Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Yes that's reasonable. That's probably not what's happening here. In some ways, the _promise_ of the FDIC getting depositors almost all their money back is enough.

The biggest problem people have right now is time. Over time, everyone will probably get most of their deposits from SVB back from SVB assets.

What people (the ones who know what they're talking about, anyway) are asking for is closer to taxpayers covering the costs of getting that money back sooner. There's a definite cost, but it's not taxpayers writing checks to cover deposit values.

View on HN

> Over time, everyone will probably get most of their deposits from SVB back from SVB assets.

> What people (the ones who know what they're talking about, anyway) are asking for is closer to taxpayers covering the costs of getting that money back sooner. There's a definite cost, but it's not taxpayers writing checks to cover deposit values.

Except it's literally asking the taxpayer to cover the costs to cover these funds for some indeterminate period of time in the HOPES that SVB will "probably" be able to make their depositors whole, someday.

I think that's what I said?

There's a cost, we don't know what it is. It's not as high as it sounds when you say "we should only let people get $250k liquid and everyone else should pound sand".

The cost to letting these companies keep their money tied up is a lot of people not getting paychecks. Which suddenly means no tax witholdings. And more unemployed people. And companies that can't pay vendors.

Doing nothing is not free. It might be cheaper, it might not. I get the instinct to hold the man accountable but it's not as simple as most people are suggesting.

But why can their investors not cover the costs? Surely the same VCs who lent the startups money can lend them some more for the short period until SVB's assets valuation gets sorted out? Aren't they the ones to lose most if the startups go down under?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com