> 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.
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:
Total number of bank failures: 512
2023 1
2022 0
2021 0
2020 4
2019 4
2018 0
2017 8
2016 5
2015 8
2014 18
2013 24
2012 51
2011 92
2010 157
2009 140
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/list-of-failed-banks/