Friendly reminder that banks are not a reliable place to keep emergency funds, they don't really have a vault full of everyone's cash always available.
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.
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.
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.
Are we talking paper money? A bitcoin wallet? Trump dollar coins?