> Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.
I think everyone knew that already. Since 2008 at least.
It's very possible that if this is not done, the only banks left at the end of the week will be the "too big to fail" ones. A domino effect is very hard to prevent when it's based entirely on consumer confidence and those consumers can very easily create a bank run on literally anything if they freak out.
Not sure I follow the logic. SVB is done right? Saving the companies that banked there is very different than saving the bank. Yes, it might invite more risk by big banks if they know there is a parachute for their clients, but if we close the bank anyways or clear out all parties involved and they have large black marks then there are deterrents (theoretically at least). I like that the gov is acting more like a scrappy company here and getting some shit done when the stakes are high. I dunno, just spitballing here, curious about the counterpoint.
From the perspective of just the people working at SVB, I guess so? But from the perspective of people putting lots of money in one place, it's a reinforcing signal that the most important part of picking a bank is that it be big enough to get bailed out in case of poor planning.
> From the perspective of just the people working at SVB
Who had the former CFO of Lehman Brothers just before it collapsed on their executive team? These people will continue to fail upwards with taxpayer support as they always do.
See you in ten years when he's involved in the next one.
What is the advantage of encouraging people/companies to spread their deposits among multiple banks? Say people were really worried about losing anything over the FDIC limit and so kept multiple separate accounts. Then a bank fails and the government still has to cover the deposits, so what's the benefit? Is the idea that if people are worried about their deposits they won't put more than the limit in banks that are making particularly risky investments? Isn't it more likely though that anyone who would do that would just spread their money out regardless, and therefore there's no disincentive to the banks.
The bank isn't being bailed out though. The depositors are being covered by FDIC in the short term, while FDIC will sell assets seized from the bank. The bondholders and shareholders will take the haircuts. If that's not enough to cover the depositors, banks will be given a special assessment.
The banks left standing will be made to cover the deposits, insured or not, of other banks. It is rather remarkable and I'm not entirely certain it'll work - at what point the special assessment could be unsustainable. Presumably this special assessment isn't instant, and FDIC could just use accounting to make it politically and legally valid to consider it as a non-public and industry financed private bailout.
shrug will it work? I don't know. It really better.
>_shrug_ will it work? I don't know. It really better
The need to be able to field questions like these is why I feel we need open-source economic simultion packages. Does anyone think that people in the individual Fed reserve banks are running anything other than flat spreadsheets to model the financial system? Theyneed to develop economic modeling scripts (at minimum!) a field which is in its infancy. The datascience & modeling capability in HN would eclipse the forecasting power of an econometrics-focused Fed statistical modeling group.
I'd like to see a python library devoted to economic modeling w/ classes for central banks, investent & retail banks, applied into umpteen think tanks' different competing models.
"Yes, it might invite more risk by big banks if they know there is a parachute for their clients, but if we close the bank anyways or clear out all parties involved and they have large black marks then there are deterrents (theoretically at least)."
* As the gp said, it's done. The guarantee isn't new, it's how thing are done now. The Fed is not changing things by doing this, the Fed is doing things as they are expected to be done. Anything else would be changing things, anything else would panic people. Is the Fed "scrappy"? IDK, the "scrappy" efforts to stop crises began with the "plunge prevention team" in the 1990s and have continued more systematically since then, if you want to call that scrappy.
* As to whether there are black marks on people - only the companies who can whether to hire these people later can decide that. Financial companies hire people who've done time for financial fraud so it's questionable what sort of "black marks" the Fed could give if it wanted to (People mention the Lehman guy but was Lehman really worse than the others in 2008 or just a scapegoat - like fricken Martha Stewart. Was that guy involved in excess or just a random manager? I recall he was now managing a stock subsidiary that's being spun-off whole. But still).
> It's very possible that if this is not done, the only banks left at the end of the week will be the "too big to fail" ones.
I don't get it. Doesn't the unlimited FDIC insurance encourage mega-banks? If funds were only insured up to 250k, wouldn't that just mean we would have to spread money across multiple banks. And sure some banks would be wiped out but new better banks would take their place. It's not a closed system
Banks used to fail and be smaller failures. Now we removed almost all failures except when we have a failure its huge:
It's like forest fires, we shouldn't build fragility into the system by removing all risk and then rely on regulations to mitigate it. Hasn't worked in the past and will lead to more consolidation and bigger fires in the future. Remember in 08 the answer was to combine a bunch of banks and since then we've had no new banks created (besides Ally which was a spin off of an auto workers pension fund if i remember)
That estimate is misleading as SV failed after people pulled 45 billion out. It wasn’t a 200 billion dollar bank when it failed and people didn’t lose 200 billion dollars.
We are at ~1.3 bank failures per month in 2023 which is much closer to 2020’s 0.3/month than 2009’s 11.7 banks failing per month. That IMO says more about the rest of the year than the size of the banks that failed.
The parent comment just made the point that you need to normalize for the size of the bank, not for the number of banks per year.
Your comment takes the annual frequency and divides it by 12 to get an average monthly frequency, adding nothing to the argument of the grandparent comment.
They suggested you should normalize for the size of the bank but didn’t support it. They even used non inflation adjusted numbers.
Maximum assets under control don’t correlate with actual losses especially when people pulled money out before the collapse. It’s a completely meaningless number on it’s own.
Certainly very valid criticisms. To be fair, I specifically was trying to ballpark it and this graph does not contain the Signature failure yet so I think it is a fair representation of this particular metric.
I also think it's a good point that a dollar is not necessarily equal to another dollar in this context. But the same can be said for individual banks as well.
I put the majority of my cash in one of the smaller banks. The news that has transpired in the past few days had me mulling moving those funds to a larger bank, likely Chase (one of the too big to fail ones).
Even with the FDIC guarantees, I was not at all confident that :
1. they actually had the funds to cover _many_ bank runs; and
2. it won’t take weeks if not months for me to recover my funds, if my bank fails.
It’s entirely possibly that these lines of thoughts will motivate many more people to consider this exact move, putting even more stress in the system.
The FDIC is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. If a bank fails, your insured deposits will be made while, usually the next business day.
The US government has a debt limit. The government is going to run out of options for not exceeding that limit in a few months unless it is raised. There are people in congress suggesting that they should let the limit get hit. If the debt limit is hit, do you e pectin the government to be able to pay out FDIC money in a timely manner?
Not just FDIC though, in 2008 and again today the Fed is making clear that their backstop is bigger than just FDIC. it can’t be any bigger than the debt limit so I find it sobering to have this discussion while we’re heading towards that cliff.
With the Bank Term Funding Program, people who moved or previously kept monies in large banks have less incentive to do so, until 2024 when this program is scheduled to end. That is, if they think 25 billion is enough to prevent more runs, and the FED/treasury/FDIC will not greatly expand that in the event of another run.
IMO you should probably do business with multiple banks with somewhat separate market segments to try and diversify risks. You shouldn't have all your cash under one mattress ;)
Imagine you’re a business owner. Would you rather bank with Local Community Bank, the failure of which will essentially kill your business, due to haircuts on uninsured deposits that’ll annihilate your working capital, or will you bank with Chase, the failure of which forces government action to cover depositors because the economy is a goner otherwise?
But isn’t your CFO planning for financial risk? Do you have hazard insurance on your leased offices, what happens if one of your key employees is unavailable, a large customer is late on payment, you get hit by supply chain issues, etc.
You can’t seriously tell me that the CFO who is responsible for corporate finance at these SVB customers didn’t realize a business checking or savings account is not fully guaranteed? It’s in every single bank brochure and statement. If that’s that case, they need to suffer the consequences of poor contingency planning.
Isnt then the whole thing fault of VCs who included those covenant? The same VCs that now cry hardest?
Moreover, both startups and VCs are literally the groups that celebrate risk taking and disruption. This is it, this is the flip side of risk, the definition of risk is that you might loose. But somehow, when they loose, due to risk taking, then suddenly they want extra bail outs and help.
According to the AP, there was a second bank failure today (Sunday) and there was a risk of a third:
> In a sign of how fast the financial bleeding was occurring, regulators announced that New York-based Signature Bank had also failed and was being seized on Sunday. At more than $110 billion in assets, Signature Bank is the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history.
> Also Sunday, another beleaguered bank, First Republic Bank, announced that it had bolstered its financial health by gaining access to funding from the Fed and JPMorgan Chase.
That article is already out of date. Signature Bank also failed today.
I suspect that Signature Bank's failure is tied to their crypto activity. But the sight of 2 banks failing while there was an ongoing run on at least one more bank does seem like the kind of thing that could start a panic.
The entire regulatory system encourages mega-banks. The entire “too big to fail” concept encourages it. Complex regulations benefit those who can afford the legal costs of compliance. Dodd-Frank probably made this outcome more likely.
The role of the government in letting this happen has been under-covered so far. Weren’t they supposed to be overseeing things, stress-testing banks, etc? Regulators either were not looking, or were looking but did not notice. Regardless, there is not much sense to the argument that the government is “stepping in” tonight, because it was always involved.
Has nothing to do with flooding the world with cheap money which chased unrealistic yields. Systemic excess liquidity when deposited needs excess assets to balance. Assets which were bought at inflated prices. The question now is only how much will this house of cards collapse.
That didn't prevent multiple runs against Washington Mutual in 2008, and it won't prevent runs now. People are worried that they won't be able to get to their money even if it is insured.
Plus, even if the "typical" consumers don't freak out, businesses might. There are a lot of businesses with accounts over the FDIC limit. Only about 60% of bank deposits in the US are insured.
If I thought the US government was going to fail I'd simply try to be the first to convert my dollars to a dense and valuable commodity, like gold, and then find another government to live under. It's not like people pulling out dollars have to keep their wealth in dollars.
How would they even do that? Bitcoin handles ~350k transactions per day. VTI (Vanguard's Total Stock Index), a large size fund is on average traded 3,670k per day. That's one fund. There is no reasonable way for small customers to pull out of index funds to bitcoin unless there is a fundamental change to how bitcoin operates.
Small customers get BTC from an exchange, which keeps their accounting internally. No transaction volume limits.
Later the small customer may move that BTC to self-custody, which could be an on-chain transaction or LN or other side chain with more transaction capacity.
And perhaps there's no other way? The Japanese did the same with their overpriced real estate provlem, Europe did the same with their almost defaulting countries.
Think about who gets hurt if the banking system collapses. It ripples out into the rest of the economy, because in fact the economy runs on debt. It would be harder to maintain existing businesses and start new ones if there was a credit crunch -- we lived through a credit crunch after 2008 and it was very bad for everyone.
Even if you want certain people to get hurt by this (and there is definitely a baying mob that seems to want to cause as much suffering as possible because they just don't like certain classes of people), keep in mind that this could cause a 2008-style recession that hurts everyone.
Who do you think gets hurt more by an economic downturn? The billionaires who lose millions and end up still being rich, or the working people who lose their jobs and can't afford housing? This isn't a theoretical question, we know the answer because it happened before.
I have some off-the-grid and expat friends who I suspect are rooting for a collapse primarily to justify all the shit they did and said. These types seem to thrive on doom and I have no doubt they've always existed throughout history.
Eventually I suppose they'll be right, but primarily as a result of one of those broken clock coincidences ...
The desire to let it all burn comes from those who played by the rules.
The government's intervention creates moral hazard: those that played with fire got burnt, and those who didn't didn't, but those who didn't get burnt were positioning themselves to take advantage of the opportunities that the crispy bodies would have generated.
But the government swooped in and saved the crispies, without penalty to them, at the cost of those who had proper risk-adjusted positioning.
We see this time and time again. The government is changing the rules after the game is over to change the losers to winners. It's nonsense.
Sounds similar to when people were rooting for airlines and auto manufactures to just die in 2008 to say "fuck the rich". I'm glad they were all saved.
In human psychology, fairness is a big driving force in society. I think studies have regularly shown that people will tolerate outcomes that are objectively worse for themselves if the alternative seems unfair but objectively better.
People are not rational. Homo economicus is a myth.
Isn't spite just wanting that version of karma or justice but hurting yourself in the process. If we let these banks collapse it's definitely going to hurt lower income people more than wealthy people so to me that is 100% spite
No. Spite is hurting yourself to hurt someone else. A desire for karma is willing to hurt yourself for justice. They look very similar, but are different.
That is incorrect, spite is seeking the deliberate harm of another. It’s possible for spite to include hurting yourself to inflict it, but that’s not in any way necessary.
Sure, and karma doesn't require hurting yourself either. I meant in the specific case we were discussing, in which harming yourself was already baked into the situation. I admit I could have been clearer initially and am sorry I spoke clumsily.
Justice is the idea that people are treated equally, impartially, and fairly under a set of standards. If someone breaks the rules justice is them getting the same punishment anyone else would get, concerns about externalities don’t come into it.
Is everyone getting hurt ideal? No. But that’s a different question than is it justice.
IMO this is what happened during 2008. The government tried to minimize harm at the expense of justice, and people are angry because they don’t realize how bad it could have been.
If the two options are a) everybody except the rich get hurt and b) everybody including the rich get hurt, then I think the majority of Americans would go with b.
B is definitely where we're at. Many Americans are tired of watching the rich get bailed out with socialism-for-the-rich-not-for-the-poor. Meanwhile the not-rich continue to struggle in every aspect of life, from food to housing. And blame is placed squarely on the rich, who have a greater voice in the elected government.
No. That is called crony capitalism. True capitalism would let these banks burn and allow those who saved or have capital buy them up. No gov intervention allowed.
No, it's just called "capitalism". The thing you call cronyism is a core feature, not a bug: under capitalism, the capitalist class advances its own interests.
Please stop trying to redefine basic terminology to suit your agenda.
Yes, but we're disagreeing about the specific meaning of words. Capitalism describes an economy where capital is the mechanism through which goods and services are allocated. It is not the partnership of public and private entities, as you suggest. That would be crony capitalism.
That page describes how "crony capitalism" is used colloquially. Dictionaries are not a great source for determining canonical meaning of complex political terminology.
I argue that usage of the term "crony capitalism" is itself a form of capitalist ideology.
The socio-economic system where social relations are based on commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means of production and on the exploitation of wage labour.
Wage labour is the labour process in capitalist society: the owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie) buy the labour power of those who do not own the means of production (the proletariat), and use it to increase the value of their property (capital). In pre-capitalist societies, the labour of the producers was rendered to the ruling class by traditional obligations or sheer force, rather than as a “free” act of purchase and sale as in capitalist society.
Value is increased through the appropriation of surplus value from wage labour. In societies which produce beyond the necessary level of subsistence, there is a social surplus, i.e. people produce more than they need for immediate reproduction. In capitalism, surplus value is appropriated by the capitalist class by extending the working day beyond necessary labour time. That extra labour is used by the capitalist for profit; used in whatever ways they choose.
The main classes under capitalism are the proletariat (the sellers of labour power) and the bourgeoisie (the buyers of labour power). The value of every product is divided between wages and profit, and there is an irreconcilable class struggle over the division of this product.
It probably doesn't need to be said, but it's pretty obvious the bias in that definition.
There is no singular definition of capitalism, but many others would differ on the distinction you've drawn from earlier posts. E.g., a system based on the reinvestment of excess profits does not necessarily equate to crony-capitalism. It seems your issue is with the person using the word "socialism" to describe a social ill of crony capitalism. But there is a distinction there that is being muddled in the conversation.
Can you coherently define "crony capitalism" and explain how it's not a fallacious no-true-Scotsman defense of "real capitalism" (or whatever term you prefer)?
Capitalism disallows private and public collusion beyond what is necessary to ensure public goods, defined by those gods which are nonexcludable and nonrivalous.
How does capitalism "disallow" any of that? Where is your evidence that disallowing this is a stated goal under capitalism?
I think you're confusing "free market" USAmerican right-Libertarian ideology with capitalism itself.
Capitalism, simply put, is defined as private ownership over the means of production, and the people who have that ownership are called the capitalist class. None of that precludes any sort of collusion.
Such collusion (and other things, such as child labor) was commonplace in the Western world recently and is still commonplace elsewhere — capitalists still wail and cry foul when legislation, no matter how toothless or perfunctory, is introduced to curtail such behavior.
You’re confusing what is a central tenet and what may occur as an outcome of a poorly executed version of the principle. By that same logic, tyrannical despots could be argued as a stated goal of socialism.
>You’re confusing what is a central tenet and what may occur as an outcome of a poorly executed version of the principle.
Where does capitalism define "non cronyism" as a central tenet? Can you point to a working example of "non-crony" capitalism?
>By that same logic, tyrannical despots could be argued as a stated goal of socialism.
A central tenet of socialism is that is rejects despotism and tyranny. Supporters of socialism explicitly reject tyrannical behavior and seek to root it out if it appears.
On the other hand, capitalists cheer every time they wield state power to enrich themselves and excuse it as "just business".
Competition is a central tenet of capitalism. Collusion, particularly collusion between govt and private enterprise, aims to modify the system to reduce competition. So it follows that such collusion is a perversion that goes against the central tenets of capitalism. Which is why is gets a separate name, like crony capitalism, to differentiate it.
It’s no different than saying “dictatorial socialism”. The fact that a rather simple distinction has to be explained multiple times by multiple people becomes a chore and a Sisyphean task when it is clear someone doesn’t want to acknowledge the difference.
I don't think those are the only two options though. b) The rich now have less billions but still billions and everyone else now has to budget even harder.
There was no guarantee that the govt will make money but there is a guarantee it creates a moral hazard. If you are a banker take excessive risks and enjoy the profits, if things go wrong, the govt will bail you out.
Heads I win, Tails I dont lose.
You also ignored that govt/Fed keeps printing more money, so the taxpayer ultimately loses with inflation.
I think everyone knew that already. Since 2008 at least.
It's very possible that if this is not done, the only banks left at the end of the week will be the "too big to fail" ones. A domino effect is very hard to prevent when it's based entirely on consumer confidence and those consumers can very easily create a bank run on literally anything if they freak out.