Accounts yielding more than the 1-year T-bill should require labeling as subject to loss.
Accounts yielding more than the 1-year T-bill should require labeling as subject to loss.
You’ve created an incentive for rotating employment, thereby diffusing responsibility.
Fed accepts Treasuries at face value, not market, at the discount window.
Stress testing for banks with more than $50bn deposits. (No Barney Frank/SVB exception.)
New FDIC assessments for large deposits. Tier so banks can reasonably choose to refuse them, or charge an excess-deposit fee. ($1mm, $10mm, $100mm seem reasonable.)
Why would anyone buy short dated treasuries then, when you can load up on 25 year treasuries at a steep discount (relative to face value) then turn around and give it to the fed at face value?
>Stress testing for banks with more than $50bn deposits. (No Barney Frank/SVB exception.)
SVB had just shy of $20B in deposits
>New FDIC assessments for large deposits. Tier so banks can reasonably choose to refuse them, or charge an excess-deposit fee. ($1mm, $10mm, $100mm seem reasonable.)
Is this really an issue that exists? Are banks obligated by regulation to accept deposits or something?
We’ve already answered this question with the bailouts of SVB and Signature’s depositors. (Granted, not shareholders.)
Maybe a higher penalty rate for face-value borrowing? Or a limit to it, such that it serves as a canary?
> SVB had just shy of $20B in deposits
After the run. Before it had close to $200bn [1].
> really an issue that exists
It doesn’t, and that’s the problem.
The FDIC assesses a uniform charge on all of a bank’s liabilities. It’s clear some depositors pose a greater risk than others. I’m proposing differentiating the FDIC’s fee to incorporate that information, thereby encouraging banks to differentiate. Want to be a loosely-regulated community bank that can offer small depositors a higher rate because you aren’t paying to insure Peter Thiel? Great, now you can.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/business/silicon-valley-b...
More turnover among sr folks leads to a greater focus on (1) institutional risk management, because you can’t trust the new guys view things the same as the old, and (2) consistent reevaluation of previous assumptions, because the guy who made them is gone.
I’d argue the long tenure of sr bank employees is a weakness of the current system, not a strength.
Trivially, such a rule would be worked around by trading staff back and forth between adjacent firms. Then you’d have minimum-stay and arms-length regulations, at which point we might just see the contracting trend hit Wall Street.
The insurance premiums on larger accounts should be larger (superlinear) to handle the increased variance of larger amounts. If someone wants to store large amounts of money without (indirectly) paying the FDIC insurance fees, then they choose something else besides a bank account - perhaps a brokerage account and/or buying treasuries directly.
Furthermore, the hazard of bank management gambling the money away should be discouraged through larger capital requirements, and even criminal penalties for blowing through that capital buffer and into customer deposits due to not employing proper hedging or insurance.
It would be interesting to read policy or study papers on ideas like this; I don’t have especially strong intuitions for how they’d play out.
This would just be an acknowledgement “we’re always gonna have to do it for the big guys, might as well make it fair for the little guys too”
It seems unfair to punish depositors that have zero or very low interest rates on their deposits. At the same time, it seems fair to punish depositors which were yeild chasing that 4.50% APY from SVB savings.
Why subsidize and encourage middlemen? It's like building the scam opportunity for privatized social security insurance management, as if honesty will be the most profitable choice in managing that.. It's inappropriate for the government to design systems that reward scamming in the middle.
I generally accept the argument that people are having trouble running the gauntlet to true government backed low risk investment and that is basically by design (well inherent capitalist evolution).. Anyone who fails to get there or gets talked out of that position by an army of telemarketers in turn fuels those telemarketers getting more people to take inherently worse risk/benefit options that pay for sign ups.
I don't think there's still good reasons to use banks for savings now that anyone could buy whatever assets they like with a very similar broker account.. I think anyone accepting lower than government bond rates is basically in a corrupt financial advisor situation where the government is providing everything and someone other than the saver is siphoning money out in the good years.
Industries once formed tend to lobby to prevent things that would remove their negative role. I.e. the ability to independently buy savings bonds has not really been kept up with the baseline utility of any other financial account.
Normally banks had much more of a role in lending, etc, which is a bit more complicated than letting them leach between people and well defined bonds so I wouldn't say they can't have a function only that I would like them removed from this one.