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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

How is a bank a fragile institution? Banks are the most heavily insured and protected institutions in any modern country.

In the US for example, banks not only contribute to federal insurance but also have built joint private reserves to weather economic turmoil. In the modern world banks rarely go bankrupt because if they did that would tank any confidence in the economy and create incredible chaos.

Even in failed states like Venezuela banks are still a major pillar of economy confidence.

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Just to clarify, Nubank is not an actual/formal bank in Brazil. They have operating licenses as Financial institution and Payment institution though.

> In the US for example, banks not only contribute to federal insurance but also have built joint private reserves to weather economic turmoil.

did you miss how the banks all had to be bailed out a few years back?

Well I’m talking about present time. Past your cynical take, the reality is that the last crisis was exactly the reason why banks in the US have been growing their cash on hand the last decade faster than they did the two decades before that, while putting aside money on other reserves.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-defaul...

This is simply false - banks are not insured against failure and not protected unless some political move "too big to fail" is made, and this only makes systemic financial system failures worse.

Whether this is false depends on particular country laws. For example in the EU you can't call yourself a "bank" without being subject to regulation, and in Poland for example, if you are a "bank", your money is actually protected against failure, up to €100,000.

Deposits insurance has nothing to do with that.

> Banks are not insured against failure and not protected.

Well. Except they are. In the US not only at the federal level but also at the state level:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance

- https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corp...

- https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-defaul...

You are mistaking what is insured here. Deposits are insured, the banks themselves are not.

Here's the list of banks that have failed in the US and for which their deposits entered receivership managed by the FDIC; looks like a handful every year: https://www.fdic.gov/Bank/individual/failed/banklist.html

I'm not. I was trying to point to the OP that banks aren't as fragile as he think they are. When the very nature of your business, which is handling people's money, is federally insured, you have mitigated a lot of risk.

Yes banks can fail and they can go bankrupt, and if that happens to Nubank then this acquisition goes to hell which makes the Clojure ecosystem weaker. I give that to OP.

But saying that banks are "very very" fragile institutions I think is fundamentally wrong.

The fact that deposits are insured has nothing to do with bank solvency. People just get some of the money back when the bank blows up. Arguably this makes banks to be even more reckless and to hide more dangerous risks under the deposit insurance claims.

And the function of the regulator is to stop and DISSOLVE the bank BEFORE it goes potentially too deep into the pocket of deposit insurance fund in case of running astray. So this is a social instrument but again does not solve the institutional risk problem. Maybe, just maybe makes some banks more paranoid, but they still blow up at very high pace.

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