Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

So what you're saying is the bank made investments based on a whole lot of assumptions. These assumptions were quickly invalidated by US policy changes and then the bank lost everything.

Yes, absolutely let it all burn. They risked it all on their "strategy" and lost. Why should they get bailed out in literally any way? I don't see the government showing up to bail me out when my "strategy" gets me liquidated, why the hell do these banks deserve that treatment? Let them face 100% of the consequences of their choices.

View on HN

This is the second completely detached from reality statement you have made. The US government requires that banks spend 90% of their deposits on tbonds so that they can continue to fund the process of money creation.

The strategy is mandated by regulation post 2008. The mistake svb made was buying 10 year instead of 3 month. Hard to explain that one other than the fed said inflation would be transitory and it wasn’t.

> The mistake svb made was buying 10 year instead of 3 month. Hard to explain that one other than the fed said inflation would be transitory and it wasn’t.

So what you're saying is the bank made investments based on a whole lot of assumptions. These assumptions were quickly invalidated by US policy changes.

Got it.

The bank is already gone. It's been wiped out.

The discussion is now about the depositors.

Depositors lent their money to the bank. They took a risk by trusting a bank to manage their money for them. The bank took their money, invested it and lost it all.

Let them lose too.

It didn’t lose it all. About 90% is still there as assets and is being sold as we speak. The liquid assets have been sold already, so 50% will go back to the depositors next week.

If it hadn't become insolvent in the first place, there would have been no need to liquidate its real assets in order to pay off liabilities.

Of course but the point still stands. If it lost it all we’d all be in serious trouble. It lost ~10% and there’s a nonzero chance depositors will be made whole anyway (with zero taxpayer money involved).

You are unbanked? How well does this work in 2023?

I wish. Not completely. I do make every possible effort to move wealth off of banks though.

There are hundreds of billions in assets owned by SVB. The accounts with grocery assets likely contain companies that will be future unicorns.

What is there to burn? A large bank will likely purchase the assets/debts outright, the shareholders will get screwed, and the depositors likely be made whole. There's no bailout in that scenario

If your strategy is keeping money in an FDIC insured bank account the government will absolutely bail you out. You have a guaranteed bail out up to the deposit insurance limits and a high-probability bailout for close to 100% of your funds through FDIC resolution.

The money in FDIC is the banks’ money! Zero taxpayer investment.

NitPick: The Deposit Insurance Fund invests in Treasury securities, so technically there is a little taxpayer money from interest payments.

But the contributions to the Fund are all from member banks, not from the Federal budget.

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

Something tells me you don't understand the difference between the bank, its shareholders, and its account holders. Unless you just think its peachy that a bunch of businesses lose everything because their bank made some actually not all that risky investments and some people got spooked. This isn't 2008.

> Something tells me you don't understand the difference between the bank, its shareholders, and its account holders.

I understand the "difference" fine. I just refuse to believe there actually is a difference. They're all the same to me: people who lent their money to the bank so it could be invested and pay them dividends.

> Unless you just think its peachy that a bunch of businesses lose everything because their bank made some actually not all that risky investments and some people got spooked.

Why, that's exactly what I think. Looks like that "not at all that risky investment" didn't bring the outcome everyone expected. Oops. Looks like the free market screwed them over again. Such is life.

I suppose it's fine if they manage to liquidate the bank's assets and recover some of it. If they really insist on recovering it all, maybe they should liquidate the bank manager's personal property as well. As long as they don't see even one cent of taxpayer money, it's moral.

Because of secondary effects. It's not like SVB failure is limited to just depositors and start-ups. Which means way more damage than just the nominal amount lost.

You need failures to 'ripple through the economy'

Removing these ripples brings greater risk, which is artificial stability and moral hazard

And taking your analogy further, show me one body of water in nature that doesn't have ripples and waves on its surface (that vary in magnitude)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com