No it wouldn't have. The company would still be solvent and have a large number of total deposits, just less in total than they could've had otherwise. What they did literally destroyed the entire company; not doing so would not have had that result. The outcomes are not comparable.
What? Anybody with financial sense has noticed that rates have skyrocketed, and if you're still earning less than 1%, you're throwing money away. The more money you have, the bigger a deal that is.
Bank accounts are very sticky and most people don't move them in search of better rates. In particular, people are not thinking of cash sitting in a checking account as anything other than short term cash they don't expect to earn a return on anyway, so you wouldn't change your entire commercial bank (that everyone else in your industry also uses and expects) just to chase some small returns.
SVB was holding so many uninsured deposits because they were the operating cash for businesses. If you have $100M, the difference in interest would be $3M a year between 1% and 4%. What kind of business wouldn't be paying attention to that?
