I'll ask the obvious question, because I have no clue about this stuff. The early failures in 2008 seem to have been followed by a cascade of smaller failures. Is that going to happen again?
We don't know yet, we're slowly finding out who had exposure to what and how things are interconnected. It's a complicated machine and we'll probably know only after the fact. There's a lot of damage control messaging going on right now, and that actually makes me feel more bearish: All rumors are false until officially denied.
Right now we're dealing with the psychology of markets, if a large enough group of people get scared and want their money out, there's no amount of assurance that can stop that. They will only be appeased once they know their money is safe with them.
Even officially denied rumors can be true. See FTX ensuring panicking users that they were very much liquid, days (hours?) before they announced bankruptcy
I have no clue about this stuff either, but in my mind, every competent CEO has already asked their staff what uninsured deposits they have, what the financial condition of the institutions they have those uninsured deposits in is, they've asked their staff what they can do to mitigate risk from those uninsured deposits, and they want that answered over the weekend so they can go over it in an 8AM meeting on Monday and decide on what actions to take.
> The day before SVB fell, everybody said everything was fine.
Well, no, people were saying “Get your money out of SVB if its above the insurance limit”, because the run was already happening and that SVB couldn’t handle the run was a pretty widespread opinion.
But, while there are systemic/institutional/regulatory reasons why SVB’s conduct which created the vulnerability was possible, it doesn’t seem that the vulnerability itself is systemic in a way which makes other similar failures likely to be imminent.
Wouldn't we expect a lot of orgs to suddenly start caring if they have more than $250k in their accounts and start spreading it out over the next week, or removing it from banks entirely and putting into treasuries or other assets?
Or withdrawing entirely from niche/smaller banks and into bigger/more diversified ones?
(diversified banks are great because payday becomes mostly book entries instead of massive inflows/outflows on payday)
> Wouldn’t we expect a lot of orgs to suddenly start caring if they have more than $250k in their accounts and start spreading it out over the next week, or removing it from banks entirely and putting into treasuries or other assets?
I’d expect big orgs to mostly have money in banks specifically for reasonable cash needs (or temporary inbound flowthrough), and to have it in treasuries or other assets otherwise, but I wouldn’t expect to see much change. There’s no news here impacting accounts in other banks: the $250K insurance limit isn’t news, and there’s no reason to think that SVBs particular concentration of assets in long-maturity illiquid assets that have lost value is systemic rather than sui generis.
The ripple effects that will occur, I would think, will be more through companies that were dependent on SVB than companies with money in other banks.
I'm very curious about the bailout criterion. They can't set the rules individually for each "problematic" bank. Whatever formulation they come up with, will be immediately abused by creative financial engineering, so the problem will soon re-emerge in a different, totally unexpected shape.
> They can’t set the rules individually for each “problematic” bank.
Most past bailouts have been sui generis actions with rules adopted for individual or small numbers of institutions currently in trouble, not forward-reaching “rights” that future actors could exploit. So I don’t see why you characterize this as impossible here; if there is any bailout beyond regular FDIC process, the most likely case would be a unique specific plan for this institution that creates no general rule that anyone else could force the government to use in the future.
This "future" will arrive the very next day wrt another bank under the same type of stress, and then the next... Ad-hoc action for SVB might aggravate the situation.
In principle, they can do whatever they want, but they already know SVB is not the only problematic bank - there's a whole pipeline of them; inventing individual bailout protocol for each would look ridiculous. My bet is that Fed's PhDs are desperately looking for a formula as we speak. That won't be easy. :-)
Right now we're dealing with the psychology of markets, if a large enough group of people get scared and want their money out, there's no amount of assurance that can stop that. They will only be appeased once they know their money is safe with them.