Item — HN Reader

Is that universally a bad thing? Are all US Banks so thinly capitalized that none of them could survive a run? If so, then doesn't that make one question why you'd ever keep money in a Bank in the first place?

I get that the FDIC insurance is supposed to make you whole as long as you have less than $250K in a bank. But then you have to ask if the FDIC can actually cover that for several banks at a time - particularly at a time when the debt ceiling has not been raised and so Treasury can probably ill afford additional unplanned spending.

2 comments

Though I’ve never connected the dots the way you have, the last time major commercial banks (like WaMu) failed it was because of being caught swapping much riskier assets than this article is pinning the blame of SVB failing for. Also, when it was clear that there was a risk for cascade collapse of major commercial banks, fed leadership and potentially people from the fdic went to congress and told them to stop playing partisan football, and TARP was passed within a week.

If SVB really failed because it misstepped and believed it would make more money off of government bonds and didn’t, I don’t really see there being a risk of the major banks collapsing. If lots of smaller banks banked on (no pun intended) doing the same thing though…

What you are talking about here is the financial apocalypse. If a hundred million people all lose the money in their bank accounts, then we go back to the barter system overnight. The thing you will be bartering will likely be seeds and ammunition.