[fumeux_fume]

The money isnt going directly to the workers. It goes to the companies who employ them to make sure the employers are ok. I think the point being made is that when workers ask for protections or concessions it's this massive struggle but when Etsy needs help the money somehow appears literally overnight.

[insanitybit]

> It goes to the companies who employ them to make sure the employers are ok.

No, it's so that payroll continues...

[brazzy]

What you're glossing over is that when the employers suddenly lose most or all of their liquid assets and don't have perfect positive cash flow, then they cannot pay their employees.

[quadrifoliate]

As long as the Fed is making up rules on the spot, they could make up a fund to pay employees of the depositors directly in the short term, and start liquidating any assets of Silicon Valley Bank to pay for those. Call it, say, the Silicon Valley Bank Victims Fund.

Avoids the moral hazard created by propping up SVB while still keeping workers paid. But I bet that would be showcased by the upper class as a "handout".

[zopa]

By Monday morning? With protections in place against fraud or double-dipping? It wouldn’t be as easy as you think.

(And for the nth time, SVB isn’t being propped up. The owners are losing their whole stake.)

[quadrifoliate]

> By Monday morning? With protections in place against fraud or double-dipping? It wouldn’t be as easy as you think.

But you are somehow convinced that this fund [1] created in 1 day by the Fed to solve "temporary liquidity issues" with vague promises of "loans against securities" and "assessment charged on the banks" will be entirely free of fraud or double-dipping?

Everything involving money has the potential for fraud and double-dipping, and the banking sector has a ton of it. We can figure it out and prosecute people afterwards (or not, it's not like senior management at SVB is going to be prosecuted).

> (And for the nth time, SVB isn’t being propped up. The owners are losing their whole stake.)

Oh sure, three Federal departments make a joint statement on the weekend and create a new liquidity fund every time a company goes bankrupt. Nothing to see here!

----------------------------------------

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

[insanitybit]

This is such an absurd idea to implement in a weekend, you have to see that, right?

[quadrifoliate]

Sure, but why is it any more absurd than creating a fund out of thin air to guarantee SVB deposits?

Money provided to individuals is highly trackable; ask anyone with student loans. And this would give the former SVB's employees something to do past the current 45-day window. More employment for the win!

[insanitybit]

Creating a system to work with one entity, especially a bank, is far easier than creating one to work with 10s of thousands of individuals, not to mention that you can do this work all abstracted behind the bank without any existing systems (payroll) having to consider anything.

[treeman79]

It’s a government take over of the private sector.

Government official picking losers and winners. Winners will mostly be those who supported government officials party.

Either using money from tax payers. Or creating new money out of thin air. Leading to yet more punishing inflation.

[watwut]

This is not about salaries to employees or risk of companies dying. Neither of those get help when they are unlucky on free market.

[brazzy]

You can spin "what this is about" whatever way you want, but it's simply a fact that for the kind of businesses that typically had deposits at SVB, the overwhelming part of those deposits existed to pay employee's salaries.

[watwut]

Yep. And when other business can not pay salaries because of events they could not control, neither them nor their employees get any extra help. They get mockery from very same people that call for help now. This is about who got it.

The startups did not had all of their money in this particular bank randomly. It was by design.

[sokoloff]

What was the PPP “loan” program if not a direct example of what you claim doesn’t exist?

[hellojesus]

A corrupt program that incentivized banks to finance the largest sums first, which of course were only demanded by the largest companies, and ended up running out of funds by the time the small players got their turn in line.

It was a sad attempt at preventing a 5th Ammendment violation, and it was done so poorly that it didn't solve the issue. The 5th was still violated.

[creato]

> And when other business can not pay salaries because of events they could not control

Can you give an example of such a company? I can’t think of a way in which an otherwise healthy (long term viable) company could suddenly be unable to make payroll in such a way that assistance would not be available (e.g. inexpensive bridge loan), or the company should not have bought relevant insurance.

Literally the only thing I can think of is if smaller banks failed and companies were stuck with 250k + haircuts and didn’t get this same deal. So did that actually happen?

[subsistence234]

I'm a fan of startups, but seriously... wtf? how are startups "healthy companies"?

[ENGNR]

Every depositor is getting $250k back immediately, surely that's enough to make payroll a few times over, factoring in other revenue they must have if their payroll is that large.

For the rest of it, they might take a 20% haircut at most. Even if they had no revenue, and that was say 10 months runway, then it's down to 8 months. It's not like people aren't going to get paid, there's plenty of notice there.

[toyg]

> $250k back immediately, surely that's enough to make payroll a few times over

I'm not sure I follow. A US 60k/Y job means the company has to pay 5k p/m (to employee and taxman). So a company-depositor getting 250k would be enough to serve 50 employees. "A few times over" would only be true for less than 25 employees. If we go Silicon-Valley level, where salaries seem to be twice as high (or more), those numbers would halve again. They seem very small numbers, most SMEs would not fit them.

[gizmo]

> They seem very small numbers, most SMEs would not fit them.

In the USA 78% of businesses have fewer than 10 employees. 89% percent have fewer than 20. The typical SMB has only a couple of employees.

When you include sole proprietors (like the typical etsy store) "the share of U.S. businesses with fewer than 20 workers increases to 98.0% and the share with fewer than 10 employees registers 96.0%".

Source: https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/

[est31]

Yeah that is probably wrong but I think a notion of "omg all my money is gone" is also wrong. As long as the bank run is stopped in time, people with uninsured deposits would lose who didn't make it out of the bank in time will only a minority share instead of everything. That's what a bank run basically is, if you have 102$ in liabilities and 100$ in assets, and the FDIC steps in, everyone who holds 1$ at the bank gets 0.98$ out. Not bad. If 99$ exit the bank then the owners of the remaining 3$ only get 1$ out, a 66% loss.

The customers of SVB were quickly growing business in an industry where you can quickly obtain immensely high profit margins. A 20% cut is not the end of it.

I believe the big impact of this announcement is not the money itself, in fact it was the lowering in value of government bonds that caused the bankruptcy in the first place, so the govnernment effectively made money from the 10-year bonds deal they struck with SVB. Maybe in the end it might still be a profit for taxpayers/USD users overall. But this announcement still implies something for banks: they can do the dumbest decisions (like this failure for risk management), and the government will bail them out.

[op00to]

I'm amazed at how inexperienced the average hacker news commenter is with money.

[eppp]

I am amazed at how inexperienced the average banker is with interest rates.

[carlosjobim]

50 employees should cover most of startups.

[TheCoelacanth]

Understood, but where is the protection for workers who suddenly lose their job and can't pay rent?

[hellojesus]

Their emergency funds.

Don't get me wrong, it would suck. But there is a proven way to fix misallocation of capital via the market.

[cto_of_antifa]

Or, said anorher way, it becomes more difficult for them to profit off of the labor of others.