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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

I think there are probably thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of financial institutions around the world that could be destroyed if a handful plucked from some of the richest people in the world decides you're their enemy. To list of the financial institutions that could handle that would be the shorter list.

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Interestingly the list of some of the richest people capable of destroying such an institution would likely be highly correlated with the banks that can handle it. As it turns out the Fed's existence is due to such rich people desiring the ability to crush the mom-and-pop banks.

I think the banks that can handle it generally have diverse clientele. SVB had businesses and venture capitalists for clients. When you have a few clients who deposit billions and the relationship turns sour between the bank and some portion of the clientele, well watch out.

It doesn't need rich people. All it needs is a sizable number of customers attempting to withdraw their funds. Actually that's exactly what these "bad actors" were accused of doing, they withdrew their money and warned others that the bank had liquidity issues. Which it obviously did.

Do you know what the reserve requirement for such a bank is?

You're probably correct. That's a problem.

Whether that is a problem is a rather semantic issue. This is *property* of our credit based capitalistic system.

Remove this and you are back at medieval levels of inequality, one way or another.

Part of the reason why the fed was established was because there was a run on a significant number of banks roughly every 12 years between the founding of the US and the establishment of the fed.

Not correcting you, just supplementing what you said (it at least seems plausible without looking up the claim)

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