When a bank collapses, the post-mortems arrive fast and the lessons disappear faster — buried under bailout announcements, reassuring press conferences, and a financial press that moves on before the dust settles. This week, we slow down and do the autopsy nobody ordered: tracing how the structural incentives inside banks, inside regulatory agencies, and inside financial journalism itself consistently ensure that the warning signs are visible, documented, and ignored until they aren't. Because the story of the last bank failure is almost always the preview of the next one.