Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

Because a major component of this is human nature causing bank runs they are betting that by doing this upfront it will be cheaper than not doing it and risking a high number of similar bank runs in the coming month as word spreads it isn't safe to keep money over the insurance limit in banks because of the unrealized loses on bonds.

View on HN

At the same time, they've essentially raised the insurance limit to infinity. Depositors will be made whole, and if they aren't the next time something happens, they'll need some very good arguments for why the 9th largest bank is now also too big too fail but e.g. the 11th largest isn't.

> At the same time, they’ve essentially raised the insurance limit to infinity.

No, they haven’t. The systemic risk exception was used during the last financial crisis for some banks and not others, so using it now doesn’t raise the insurance limit, actually or “essentially”. There is (still) no guarantee that it will be used for any particular failure in the future, just like there wasn’t after the last financial crisis, and people have lost funds in excess of the $250K insurance limit since the last use of the systemic risk exception.

One could argue that SVB depositors would not be expecting the be made whole if it weren't for the bailouts of 2008. The precedent has been set and reinforced. It's hard to argue that this will not encourage more risk taking and moral hazard.

That precedent was set at least as far back in the early 90's when they made depositors of Bank of New England Bank whole after it failed in 1991. This isn't something that started with the financial crisis of '08

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/07/business/us-is-taking-ove...

It is already substantially higher than $250k because you can spread your funds between multiple banks. There are even cash management accounts from Fidelity and others that automatically place your funds with multiple banks to get higher insurance levels for larger amounts of cash. Their Fidelity cash management account allows you to spread cash among 26 different banks so you could have 6.5 million FDIC insured. Fidelity isn't the only financial institution to offer this service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com