In fact, bank failure and then having the government only guarantee ~$50k of funds per person is a good way to hand wealth to the people and take it from corporations and the super wealthy.
In fact, bank failure and then having the government only guarantee ~$50k of funds per person is a good way to hand wealth to the people and take it from corporations and the super wealthy.
I was going to write a shitty reply to this, but the more research I did, the more it seems actually this went pretty well for them. UK and NL governments that lost deposits in the Icelandic banks mostly got their cash back (eventually), there was recession and unemployment but not that much worse than other countries, and the country is in good standing again with the markets.
I would note that this is much much easier to do if your investors are foreign, rather than domestic pension funds, so it doesn’t bring down the government, though.
Hence the power that be try to prevent it best they can. In some cases, unsuccessfully (Iceland) and in others, a bit more successful (the US). But seemingly, they're only able to delay the inevitable, not completely prevent it.
The global economy isn’t pivoting off Icelandic banks the way it is off US ones.
I suspect the real profit is made by also being in a position to adjust laws and rules to make sure your investment survives, as well as turning low rated bonds effectively into government bonds. All those things are at the expense of others in the bigger picture.
And perhaps have the insurance pay out only once per year per person too, so that when multiple bank failures happen at once there is not much benefit to splitting funds.
The cause of the run isn't that important, and if you banking system collapses because companies pull out all their money you're not in a better position than if individuals do.
What you suggest will hit normal persons.
What we really need is people going to jail that let stuff like that happen. Let them bear actual responsibility for their 1,000k+ salary.
If a bank like JP Morgan were to fail, the event would be without exaggeration cataclysmic to everyone, even small local banks and credit unions. Even if ultimately the clients of JPM could be made whole, the weeks of uncertainty and frozen funds would single handedly obliterate the financial systems across the globe. It's the age old adage: "if you get margin called and get wiped out, it doesn't matter that you'd have recovered just 2 weeks later". The world as a whole is deeply leveraged. It's that leverage that affords us the ability to supercharge all the growth, from AI to drugs research, insurance, EV... everything. But that leverage comes at a cost, which is that systemically important institutions failing can have disastrous cascading de-leveraging effects.
I'm sure we'd more or less all survive and the world would recover, but it would likely be a 2008 GFC style scenario most likely.