Bank OZK

Ernest Hemingway wrote in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) tells me this snippet of dialogue between Mike and Bill is now “widely recognized as a metaphor for situations where something builds up slowly, like accumulated debt or a creeping disaster, before reaching a critical point and exploding suddenly.”

Bank failures happen the same way. Government protection and deposit insurance slows the inevitable—until it doesn’t.