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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

Sure the depositors that had more than 3x my annual salary just sitting in their account.

Of all the "evil" things one could do with gargantuan wads of cash, having it sit in a bank account is just about the most innocuous thing I can think of to do with it. It seems like a wise, cautious move actually, and it seems like it'd be bad to punish businesses for being cautious with their money

Their money is being used to make investments and they're getting paid interest for it. If their deposit was above the amount insured by the FDIC then they knew it could all be lost if the bank collapsed. I wouldn't call lending more than 250k to a bank "cautious" (that's what you do when you "deposit" your money in a bank), they could have bought Treasury bonds instead. But maybe they were smart and had guessed that in this third world financial system, if your bank is too big to fail, depositors get bailed out by the government anyway.

It kinda depends on scale doesn't it? For an individual 250k in cash seems like a lot (although can easily happen just before or just after a large purchase.)

For even a "small" business though it's quite small. We're small (<50 employees) but payroll is around 1.5m per month. We keep about 2m as "working capital". This is cash that is literally flowing all the time.

In this context 250k is tiny, and wouldn't cover our day to day balance.

I guess you'll have to wait for The Narrow Bank to become operational. In the meantime the best you can do is lend your money to an institution that is too big to fail.

Accounting for inflation, the interest paid is several percent negative.

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