It's not that weird. It's basically a checking account. Lot of countries those have fees attached. It's also the historical origin of banks. strong men with vaults to store your coins. It's no longer attractive because of fiat currency, which has strong inflatuonary pressure; and because of the fish-in-water effect of two
centuries of capitalism, people no longer can distinguish between savings and capital, the divider between those two conc3pts is no longer part of the mental model of forms of wealth.
Narrow banks are no longer attractive because lending out depositors’ money has positive externalities. It’s used to fund mortgages and small business loans. That’s a positive.
Are there downsides? Sure, but what we saw this past few days is that the system worked. SVB was dumb, the federal government stepped in to save deposits, management was fired because they did dumb things, and the shareholders were likely zeroed out because they owned the company doing dumb things.
Yes, we could pull money out of the financial system, but that might well be worse for everyone.
I know it's very trendy to advocated for that, but we do know that the removal of the gold standard was an attempt to keep the United State economy from melting down too, right? It's not actually a solution to all our economic woes. Sure, removing the gold standard created a new class of problems but going back isn't going to stop the ones we used to have.
>I know it's very trendy to advocated for that, but we do know that the removal of the gold standard was an attempt to keep the United State economy from melting down too, right?
I'd rather it was let to melt down, learned the lesson, and we went for a more sustainable model.
Makes perfect sense to me. If you are ok with the risk of losing it all. You go in for an investment vehicle. Or you go in for a vault.