Key elements of Jason’s prediction did not occur, even though one numerical aspect was close.

1. Scale of the backstop. He said the situation would likely require roughly $25–50 billion, about 5–10% of TARP. In practice, Treasury authorized up to $25 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund as a backstop for the Federal Reserve’s Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), created in direct response to the SVB/Signature stress. (sfnet.com) TARP’s original authorization was $700 billion, so $25 billion is ~3.6% of TARP—slightly below but broadly in the same ballpark as his 5–10% of TARP framing. (en.wikipedia.org) So the order-of-magnitude part of the prediction was reasonably accurate.

2. Who bore the losses and how. SVB’s failure is estimated to cost about $20 billion to the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF), funded by assessments on banks, not by general taxpayers. (fdic.gov) The FDIC is recouping those costs through a special assessment on banks, not through a taxpayer-funded capital injection. (reuters.com) This is structurally quite different from a TARP‑style government investment funded by taxpayers.

3. No TARP‑style equity/warrants in SVB or its depositors’ companies. Jason envisioned taxpayers getting senior claims and warrants in SVB and/or affected companies, allowing them to potentially earn a 50–100%+ profit. In reality:

   • Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders of SVB were explicitly not protected; there was no federal equity infusion into SVB itself. (federalreserve.gov) SVB equity went to (or near) zero in the receivership, so taxpayer-held warrants in SVB would not have produced large gains.
   • In the actual sale, the FDIC received equity appreciation rights in First Citizens BancShares stock (up to about $500 million), which it later exercised, providing some offset to DIF losses. (fdic.gov) But this upside accrues to the FDIC’s insurance fund, not as a large, TARP‑like profit stream to general taxpayers, and it is far smaller than the ~$16–20 billion estimated cost to the DIF.
   • There were no broad-based warrants or equity stakes in the portfolio companies/depositors as part of the official rescue framework.

4. Taxpayer profit claim. Jason’s core claim was that a roughly $25–50 billion government backstop, structured with seniority and warrants, could plausibly return at least 50% and potentially 100%+ profit to U.S. taxpayers over time. Since:

   • The actual intervention did not use taxpayer-funded equity or broad warrant positions,
   • The publicly documented outcome is a large net cost to the FDIC’s fund with relatively modest offsetting upside (First Citizens equity appreciation rights), there is no realized 50–100%+ profit to taxpayers from a TARP‑like SVB backstop.

Because the actual policy architecture (FDIC resolution funded by bank assessments + Fed lending backed by a mostly unused $25B Treasury backstop) diverged from the TARP‑style, warrant-heavy structure he described, and no such profit stream to taxpayers materialized, the overall prediction about how a government backstop would work out for taxpayers is best classified as wrong, despite his back-of-the-envelope estimate of the scale (around $25B) being roughly aligned with the authorized backstop size.