Her life savings mysteriously disappeared after a systems glitch
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A good reminder that your emergency fund should be held in cash at a bank, not in shares a brokerage. Not that a glitch like this couldn’t block access to your bank account too, but rather that the process of liquidating and transferring securities is much slower than ACH or Zelle.
And yeah, looks like that's not a foolproof solution either. 3rd backup option might be needed... :D
This is not merely a theoretical risk. Patelco (a Bay Area credit union with half a million members) got hit with ransomware back in 2024 that disrupted banking services for two weeks.
As a good friend, if I know that you are good for the money, I'd happily spot you even a few tens of thousands for a few days or weeks. (I'm actually more reluctant to do that with some family members, because I might be less likely to get the money back.)
Are we talking paper money? A bitcoin wallet? Trump dollar coins?
When the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, funds were only inaccessible for 72 hours, and no depositors lost any money [0]. Which is still not ideal, but most people will never experience a bank collapse, and there are plenty of banking activities that will take longer than 72 hours to process in regular circumstances anyways.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...
> [...] so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, [...]
On paper, FDIC might be independent and have its own balance sheets. But in practice and given politics, FDIC itself can't fail / isn't allowed to fail. It'll always be bailed out, and that's what the market expects.
For the stability of the economy, it would have been better not to make uninsured depositors whole.
The bigger question is how much food and medicine is there in the supply chain buffers? If all production was to stop immediately — how many calories are on the continent? How many grams of insulin or penicillin?
In a crisis how will those things be distributed? Will it be based on immediate need or social class?
What’s keeping the system going anyways? Why do ships continue to come with consumer goods from China? Why do farmers send their grain to market?
It’s kind of neat to think about what will happen in this sort of scenario. I wonder how long the data centres will keep running, churning out models that don’t have a market an aren’t quite good enough for AGI.
Most of the talk in this discussion is about personal emergencies, like being locked out of your accounts; not about system-wide bank collapses.
There is no one reliable place. You must hedge with diverse custodial and non custodial forms of store of value for best assurance.
Only if you consider fiat money that can be printed in arbitrary amounts by Mr. Bernanke's famous printing press to be "something that tangibly exists".
The Consumer Price Index has inflated by a factor of more than 15 from January 1947 through March 2026 [1]. That's an annual rate of inflation of about 3.45 percent. That's an indication of how the USD does not hold its value--if you have a stock of dollars that you want to hold the same buying power year to year, you have to add 3.45 percent to it every year just to stay even.
A nice, mostly-even 3% a year is spectacular. Gold can't do that. Bitcoin can't do that. Only a central bank can do that.
Gee, I dunno, anything whose value as measured in dollars increases by more than 3.45% a year? Like, just off the top of my head, stocks, bonds, real estate, and yes, gold. Bitcoin, maybe.
> A nice, mostly-even 3% a year is spectacular.
I don't think you understand that that 3.45% a year is not a rate of appreciation, as if dollars were an asset. It's a cost that you have to bear every year if you insist on holding dollars instead of something that, um, holds its value. In other words, it's a rate of loss of value of dollars.
> Only a central bank can do that.
If you mean that only a central bank, as an agent of a government, can force people to use money that loses value every year as the central bank prints more, yes, that's quite true. But it doesn't mean what you appear to think it means.
Yes, because the "value" of those assets is just a guess until you try to sell them. It might be a highly educated guess, but it's still a guess. And the time the bank would need to sell them--because it needs more cash due to an unusually high demand for cash withdrawals--is precisely the time that your educated guesses all go out the window: you're selling not because you're making a trade to improve your rate of return, but because you need cash, now, and buyers will know that and will gouge you on the price.
That doesn't seem relevant here. The account disappeared due to a data maintenance error; it wasn't extracted via a legitimate transfer to another account, they literally forgot about it.
And in a worst case scenario where I can’t access the front half of my savings due to a bank run or other failure, I am only a week or so away from getting access to some part of my savings.
Maybe you’re right though. I maintain a non-trivial amount of data in my password manager to ensure I always have a centralized place to begin the hunt for information.
A glitch prevented her account from being displayed for a few days, then was resolved. Your money, when covered via FDIC/SIPC and federal regulations, doesn’t just “disappear”.
The only physical thing I’ve got from my bank is an ATM card.
My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they beg me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.
> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
Yep. If they had implemented it just like the mail, they'd just email me the PDF (encrypted if necessary). But they don't, so I don't ever agree to "go electronic statements".
Pretty much had to physically find it myself. Was the last time I let that happen…
Deposit insurance coverage protects depositors against the failure of an insured bank; it does not protect against losses due to theft or fraud, which are addressed by other laws
...and prevented her from having any access to money? That's way more than a glitch, that's essentially a temporary version of theft.
Think about how comfortable you would be with such a "glitch" preventing you from having access to any of the money in your main spending account? One day? One week? A month? How about a year, with court battles?
If you get uncomfortable at a month or a year, remember that the only difference between you and some other people is one of magnitude. Some people can't wait two weeks or even a week for financial institutions to get their shit together and fix their "glitches". This can upend their entire life and needs to be treated with the appropriate seriousness.
As an aside it's always a good idea to have a level of resiliency built into your life and avoid single points of failure. Accounts at two different banks, access to credit via credit card (even if you don't carry a balance), etc. Just like with planning for a disaster, while it's infeasible to store food for a year in an apartment, not having 3 days of food and water stored to cover an emergency is also risky: the same planning should extend to financial matters.
But there was more than likely post mortems and days of meetings over it. Since it sounds it was a edge case upon edge case they didn't plan for.
>When she called on Monday, she received some more clues on what went wrong: Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
What exactly is "clickbait" here? Is the disappearance "mysterious" or not here? I'm not a banking tech engineer, so I don't have the slightest clue how a bank's app could completely glitch out for days about something as critical to people as their life savings. Were you even aware that this is something that could just happen? Do you have a notion that this issue would have resolved itself without the aggressive petitioning by the account holder? Explain to us how you would go to the FDIC with a claim when the FDIC covers customers with provable losses, and the article reports that this person was so ghosted out of the system that Fidelity's customer support was telling her, “Are you sure you shouldn’t be calling Schwab”?
From the article:
> Ms. Gruntmane felt she had little choice, and was forced to cancel her 20 or so patients for the day. After a quick stop at home to retrieve her personal computer, identification and other records, she got back into her car and started driving. “It just felt out of, like, a psychological thriller,” she said.
> As she was driving through Vail, she called her mother, who suggested trying to reach Fidelity’s fraud department one more time. She pulled over, and finally reached a rep who was more helpful. He also couldn’t immediately find any evidence of her accounts, but she had found one account number to share with him. After a second hourlong call, he promised they would continue to investigate, but said it was most likely a systems-related issue.
Explain to me how this isn't of interest to people who touch online systems? Is there a status.fidelity.com that we have access to, that you could point out how systemic or non-systemic this kind of incident is?
I don't. I flag them whenever I see them. They're annoying and not interesting or useful.
> Since her account was originally opened with a tax identification number (she was a permanent resident at the time), a system glitch emerged when she recently opened a custodial Roth I.R.A. for her daughter using her own Social Security number. Even though she said she had used her Social Security number at Fidelity for years, it appears her profile and accounts hadn’t been properly merged and updated. A work profile set up by a former employer more than a decade ago with her Social Security number may also have complicated matters. (She said she had never activated or used it.)
If someone else can freeze, deny, censor, or condition your access to your money, then your "ownership" is incomplete, and definitely, not yours.
Never let cash go away. Never.