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FDIC to hit biggest US banks with $16B bill for SVB clean-up (ft.com)
72 points by fairytalemtg on May 12, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 133 comments



Ah, yes, and there's the hat trick.

$16 Billion in fees (so far!) means you and I, regular people, will be paying to bail out SVB, it's bad decisions, and it's account holder's bad decisions. Wonderful.

Somehow we convinced a significant portion of the country that tax payers won't be responsible for these unprecedented bailouts. Yet, here we are.


That sounds like a large number, but given the amount of money flowing through the banking system it's basically a rounding error. This isn't even a tough call: I'm thrilled to lose a six pack of beer's worth of interest payments rather than have my regional bank go out of business because everyone's freaked out about the safety of their deposits.


Privatize profits, socialize losses. No wonder it works when you can justify it like that.


Socialize losses + Medicare, Medicaid, ERC, unemployment, education, subsidize food, housing, solar, recycling etc etc.

System is working out nicely actually.


> Socialize losses + Medicare, Medicaid, ERC, unemployment, education, subsidize food, housing, solar, recycling etc etc.

I don't understand your point. Those other items are government services that I receive in exchange for paying taxes. Banking is a private for-profit enterprise, except when they mess up, then I pay for it. How are they the same?


but you don't use medicare every day right? You only use it when there's a problem.

Just the same, not everyone "uses" bank bailouts, but when they do, it prevents other problems in society.

The only reason you'd be against it is because you think you will _never_ use a bank bailout, so in your mind, you're paying a tax for a benefit which you will never receive.

But then why isn't this the same argument used for regular welfare?


'Privatize profits, socialize losses beyond a certain threshold' wouldn't be as compelling of a slogan to rally behind.

It's unfortunate that a sizable fraction of HN comments veer into sloganeering nowadays but I don't blame the parent, there are simply not that many interesting one-liners left to say that hasn't been said dozens of times already after 35 million comments.


That's a curious description of insurance.


> everyone's freaked out about the safety of their deposits

Everybody knew that they were insured only until $250,000. At my bank, it's on a plaque at every self-service ATM at every branch. Every single person who deposited in these banks knew this and decided to live with that risk. The risk came due, and now the FDIC has decided that banks that are too big or influential get an unlimited protection, but small little mom-and-pop banks won't get a penny past $250K if they screw up.

I think that if you actually put more than $250K in the bank and got hit, that's on you. You should've gotten insurance from elsewhere or used multiple banks. It literally exists and it's optional, it's called Depositors Insurance Fund Coverage (DIF), and it insures everything over $250K if you opt-in. You could also get MaxSafe, which insures up to $3.75 million. Wealthfront has a bank account with $5 million of insurance for those interested. Regular people should not pay a penny for bad risk-taking. To me, this reeks "Privatize the gains, socialize the losses."


The FDIC plaque says “at least $250k.” This is how the FDIC works. By the same logic you’re free to use accounts that aren’t FDIC-insured if you have a problem with how the FDIC works.


> By the same logic you’re free to use accounts that aren’t FDIC-insured

Unless you are going foreign, FDIC insurance is legally mandatory. But be prepared for a hellish tax return the moment you open a foreign bank account - the IRS will demand a lot of paperwork.

Edit for reply: There is NCUA for credit unions; but the limits are the same, still mandatory, and it's the US Government again. Basically off-brand FDIC.


The NCUA doesn’t insure too-big-to-fail banks to my knowledge. I feel that’s a reasonable alternative somebody would pick over an FDIC-insured bank were they concerned about insurance assessments. There’s also offshore, as you said.


Probably a distinction without a difference, but I have a non-FDIC insured account at a credit union. It's covered by NCUA instead, which probably works similarly as FDIC insured accounts.


I thought it was socialism for the rich?


National Alliance estimates it would cost $25B per year to eliminate homelessness in America. As always, it's the upper echelon that is the true welfare state.


The United States already spends over 1 trillion every year on social assistance, including 71 billion yearly on housing assistance. Anyone claiming that it would be merely a money problem to end homelessness is lying to you.


Bc the strategy is all wrong. They need to give them homes to live in for free, no strings attached. There's ~600k homeless people in america. If the budget is $25B per year, that's 43k/person. No means tests just free apartments.


You run into the issue - once you start giving out free homes, you will suddenly have a lot more homeless people. It's called induced demand (people who were borderline homeless will prefer to go homeless to get a home rather than keep fighting to stay off the street).

People who quote a number like $8B forget that proposed solutions to the problem can actually change the scope of the problem.

I'm sure that while the number of homeless might be 600K, the number of close-to-homeless is likely at least 10X that number.


And? What's so bad if we extend free housing to everyone who is killing themselves working to just barely make rent and also may eat ramen? Not just those actually sleeping in the gutter.


I'm not saying whether or not we should do it. I'm saying that the estimates given (8B) don't take into account behavioral changes based on the program. If we expand the scope (as you said), we're looking at ~80B instead of 8B.

But that's just one example - there are many other possible behavioral changes that can happen that will alter the cost computed up front even more (i.e. we're not even considering fraud with people applying for free housing and how much $ it will take to catch the fraud and deal with it).

I think we should advocate for solutions, as long as we keep in mind the true potential costs.


such a gov't program would discourage jobs that pay very little, but still needs doing. It's a harsh thing to say, but society has a need for such roles, and it is the threat of homelessness that "forces" people into taking such roles. I'm not saying it's right, but it is reality.


Those roles don't have to pay very little - that's a choice we make as a society. We can always subsidize the pay by taxing wealthy business owners, programmers, doctors and lawyers a bit more (and real estate speculators, etc).

It is actually a pretty bad thing for society how much people are paid to optimize ads and dark patterns for example - something that is absolutely of zero net benefit to society as a whole. I think there should be a tax on anyone working in ad-space.


> They need to give them homes to live in for free, no strings attached.

Possibly. But you need to address the fact that a lot of these folks need expensive medical assistance. That isn't just housing.

Somewhere around 15% of SF homeless have a traumatic brain injury. That's about 1 in 8 homeless who desperately need expensive medical assistance.

Single payer/medicare for all would have a larger impact on the homeless than mere housing or cash.


Can I get one of the free houses also? Happy to stop paying $4600 a month in rent.


> National Alliance estimates it would cost $25B per year to eliminate homelessness in America

I’ve seen it as low as $8bn [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-12-21/cityla...


I am very skeptical of these low-ish figures, given current efforts are excessively expensive - such as LA spending $800k+ per individual.

[1] https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-t...


The situation with LA's Proposition HHH was pure graft, imho. The voters were duped into thinking that their increase in sales tax was going to end the encampments, but there was fine print in the measure that enabled two devopers to rake in vast amounts of money while not remotely solving the problem.

The language of the housing first measure stipulated that the developers of the housing had to have previous experience developing permanent supportive housing. There were only two developers that qualified, making them for all practical purposes no-bid contracts.

LA could've sheltered every human being on the streets with that money, and still would've had hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase cheaper, existing housing. That whole thing was just wicked, brazen corruption that extended the needless suffering of everyone living on the street.


Having experienced many similar stories, including the infamous High-Speed Rail in California, I see no reason we can assume this type of thing can do any better under existing systems.


That’s obviously a wrong or insufficient because much more has spent than that without fixing the problem.


A. It is a large number and we should trivialize it B. Great - if you are happy to pay then you can and should. I, however, am not and should not be forced to pay for some rich peoples mistakes.


Is it a lot of money per person? No. But it’s plain lie that tax payers don’t pickup the bill. We do, every single dollar of it.


It's not the taxpayers that are picking up the bill, it's the banks, and probably the customers. It ends up to pretty much the same crowd, but it depends how the banks will make up those fees on their balance sheets. They could just choose to reduce dividends if they wanted to.


I’m not 10 years old to think banks will cut profit. Nor they should.


The point is that they won't assign the losses equally across all members. This might have no effect on large banks since they're getting more members from fleeing regional bank members, and smaller regional banks to be less competitive.

Maybe larger banks will cut marketing spend, and just keep fees low, or hike up fees on low net worth members to cut keep the top X%.

They will most likely want to make this loss transparent to the users they want to keep, and banks have a lot of levers they can pull.

Disclaimer: I work as a SWE at a neobank.


> It's not the taxpayers

> probably the customers

Practically every person in the US has a bank account, so...


I think you'd be surprised how many people in the US are unbanked -- around 6M households (so if we go by the average household size, 15M people) in 2021. Granted, this number has been dropping over time, for better or worse.

Also consider that most banks in the US are not being hit with this $16B bill. If you bank at one of the thousands of other banks, you won't be affected by this. And if you do bank at one of these banks, and they choose to increase fees or lower interest rates, you're free to vote with your wallet and move your deposits elsewhere.


And those customers are tax payers, being forced to pay something by the government.


I see the logic, but you can say that about anything. The bank pays for insurance on your deposits.

If you want your own insurance or you don’t want insurance, you can certainly do that by not using FDIC-insured accounts.


That’s the whole problem. It’s not about FDIC insurance - I’m happily using it and accepting the cost. It’s about arbitrary decision to guarantee funds beyond explicit FDIC limits and blowing up the cost.


The systemic risk exception is no secret. There are plenty of other places to put your money. This cost is not borne by taxpayers.


This article is about the government forcing the banks to pay, who will force it on their customers, who are taxpayers.


No such thing as a non FDIC insured account. It's pretty much illegal to provide one


You can use a credit union or eurodollars.


Did you read the article?

"The proposal spares the vast majority of the US’s 4,500 FDIC-insured banks, and the fees are computed based on banks’ uninsured deposits on the grounds that $15.8bn of the $18.5bn cost of the SVB and Signature losses were due to the coverage of accounts larger than the $250,000 limit, and most of those accounts are in large banks."

If you bank at one of the 4,500 other banks, they do not have any additional fee as part of this special assessment. If you bank at one of the banks that has this special assessment, it's like all other fees the bank pays as the cost of doing business. That cost went up, and if they choose to pass it on then it should make them less competitive which would in theory have you bank at some place smaller which then in theory would have less of a FDIC risk. All in theory as the invisible hand of the market isn't always so straight forward.


A stable banking system is very much in regular people's interest.


So is not arriving it at by rewarding excessive risk taking (ie no shareholder or exec clawbacks of comp) by taking it out of the pockets of regular people by way of the additional costs incurred upon them by their US GSIB, after smaller banks went to Congress and complained they were "excessively regulated." [1]

It seems the party line is that it's totally fine for the Fed to reject Narrow Banking [2] (which is as close to zero risk as you can get in developed world finance at the cost of fractional reserve banking), but hand wringing across them, FDIC, OCC, and the executive branch when JPM needs to save the banking system again [3] [4]. Who could ever foresee the cyclic crises of our own making /s.

EDIT: We could have an inherently stable banking system. Regulators collectively choose a lesser alternative.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/13/svb-...

[2] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-san...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/business/first-republic-j... | https://archive.is/IFBW7

(jpm customer)


Genuinely curious, if our banks only received interest from the Fed:

1. How are loans originated? If they can only deposit at the Fed, how is anyone supposed to get a mortgage?

2. What value does the bank provide at that point? Why wouldn't the Fed just give people bank accounts?


1. Bond issuance and securitization, as happens today for most mortgages. The existing capital markets, broadly speaking.

2. Exactly [1]. Similarly to airlines, it’s a utility masquerading as a business. Everyone gets a demand deposit account, no fees, and instant payment functionality. Everyone else in the ecosystem is then either a lender or some sort of value add financial services provider.

Good questions!

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357...


It appears Matt Levine covers #1 in much more depth than I in a recent money stuff piece.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-11/blacks... | https://archive.is/SrzgL


Shareholders of SVB are getting nothing.

Also jpm is generally coming out ahead on this because they bought FRC on discount and because of the increased amount of deposits.


> A stable banking system is very much in regular people's interest.

Everyone and everything responds to incentives. The message that FDIC just sent out is that you can make mistakes, you can mismanage your liquidity, and everyone else will pay to clean up your bill. What does that incentivize banks to do? It just encourages repeat behavior until there's nobody large enough to pay the difference. Not a recipe for stability.

Whereas, let's say SVB fell. Painful, yes. Lessons learned? Oh yes, nobody's going to let that happen again anytime soon; be it depositors or bankers. Long-term stability or short-term stability, pick one.


Anyone actually involved with decisions managing the bank was not bailed out. The people who were bailed out are depositors.

If you want to make this argument, the correct version is that depositors are incentivized to find the bank paying the highest interest regardless of risk. But I think this argument is very weak.


The event illustrates that banking is an inherently unstable business. Depositors must have the illusion of being able to withdraw everything anytime on demand, because it's their "money". Banks have a huge incentive to invest the deposits in things that can't necessarily be liquidated on demand, because what in the world other than a bank account can be?

The choice then is a) to accept some bank failures and depositor wipeouts, or b) inexorable pressure to centralize the risk structure until you have something remarkably like Gosbank[1] or 1 bank for everyone.

We tried the FDIC scheme, it was nice, but when the deposit limit is overtopped these days the bank is not stable.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosbank


Absolutely; someone else somewhere in these threads called banking something like "a utility masquerading as a business", and I couldn't agree more. Bank accounts should be provided directly by the Fed, and/or perhaps have US Post Office branches act as bank branches. Accounts should be provided for free, with minimal hassle needed to open one.


> If you want to make this argument, the correct version is that depositors are incentivized to find the bank paying the highest interest regardless of risk. But I think this argument is very weak.

Not only is it weak, it argues the wrong thing. Depositors should be incentivized to find the bank paying the highest interest, and should not have to worry about risk. That's kinda the point of the FDIC. Your average banking consumer is woefully unqualified to evaluate a bank's risk level, and that's how it should be.

SVB's customers took a risk putting more than $250k into their accounts. Sure, many of them had deals on loans and such that required them to keep high balances, but they also had the option to purchase additional depositor insurance. They chose not to, so I don't see why anyone should be forced to bail out their/SVB's losses, whether it's taxpayers as a whole, or even just customers at some subset of other banks. Remember, we're not talking about random average-Joe banking customer. These are businesses that should mostly know better.

A possible fix for this might be that banks could be required to notify customers when they have uninsured deposits, and suggest alternative insurance options. And in a case like SVB, where some depositors were contractually obligated to keep more than $250k there, perhaps the bank should be required to provide additional insurance along side deals where they require higher balances.


> But I think this argument is very weak.

It's particularly weak given that depositors are deliberately not given clear information on the liquidity and balance sheets of their banks to avoid bank runs. The FDIC said that SVB was stable and in good shape a day before it failed.


Tax payers aren’t responsible for any of this. Only people who use the banking system, receive interest, have deposit accounts…

If you are unbanked and work a W2 (paid in cash of course), you’re not on the hook for any of this!

It’s a coincidence that 99.99% of tax payers use the banking system.


> Tax payers aren’t responsible for any of this.

The tax payers who voted for the politicians who drafted, voted for, and signed the legislation to relax banking (or any) regulations absolutely are responsible for this. But it's not like we can just send the bill to these people.

Perhaps one day we will get it through peoples' thick skulls that deregulation leads to tax payer bailouts - be that financial institution bail outs, the public paying to cleanup environmental disasters, or whatever. But I'm not hopeful. Most voters listen to the blatant lies and culture war BS being fed to them constantly.

Corporations are largely going to do whatever they can to make a buck. The best you can do to combat this is put laws in place to prevent bad behavior and have a strong enforcement arm to ensure that it's cheaper to follow the laws than it is to break them.


I really sigh over comments like this. It just shows how shitty the banking system is. This is exactly why I keep moving more and more into being my own bank (the .01%).


There are alternatives like Bitcoin, but on HN they're met with immediate resistance and bad faith arguments. An open mind genuinely interesting in learning about alternatives is needed to have this discussion.


> There are alternatives like Bitcoin

How is it a bad-faith argument to accurately state that using Bitcoin as a "bank" would be far too volatile for basically everyone.

The alternative -- which doesn't require fad technology and buzzwords -- is "narrow banking": deposit-only banks that don't loan money out, and therefore can easily survive a 100% run on themselves.

Hell, this doesn't even need to be a for-profit business. The Fed should just offer consumer accounts, free of charge. The USPS could offer banking services at their branches for people who need to do things in-person.


> Bitcoin as a "bank" would be far too volatile for basically everyone.

If you use bitcoin as collateralized lending and borrowing, it becomes a banking tool. Price becomes far less of an issue as long as you maintain your collateralization ratios. Volatility of the price is at least partially offset by the utility of earning interest on it. This also has the effect of making bitcoin more scarce as it becomes more and more locked up as debt. 21m max, it becomes deflationary if enough people become their own bank.

> The Fed should just offer consumer accounts, free of charge.

No. We have enough government control of finances as it is.

Ever have the state board of equalization empty your bank account without any warning because they thought you owed them money? I have. It has been two years and I still haven’t gotten my money back.


Bitcoin's volatility is a significant concern as it undermines its potential as a reliable store of value or medium of exchange. However when governments print money like bandits, Bitcoin is a hedge that preserves wealth better than a rapidly inflating currency or any other asset in the last decade, despite its volatility.


Agreed. That said, I'm not afraid to talk about some aspects of crypto here and I think it is worth pushing against the few noisy profiles that are so strongly anti-crypto. I just have to word things in a way that I'm speaking about facts and not trying to directly shill something, which I'm honestly not.

This comment I made recently might shed some light on what I'm talking about...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918310

It is possible to lend wrapped bitcoin as collateral, borrow against it and then re-lend out that borrowed thing (or use it to provide liquidity). Essentially enabling one to use that bitcoin "investment" to work for you instead of just being a shiny pet rock that HN loves to hate on. This is part of 'being your own bank' and a way to move away from the traditional banking system into something more decentralized.

DeFi is also why I say that the biggest threat to bitcoin is wrapped bitcoin. =) I haven't touched the actual bitcoin chain, in years. Given that other chains, which support wrapped bitcoin, now use a fraction of the energy they did previously (proof of stake), it makes the ESG arguments around bitcoin itself, go out the window.


This. So much this. More than ever now.


It's a cheap price to pay. Imagine if the FDIC had said "fuck you", All the companies and individuals with big deposits in the weaker banks would have started bank runs on them immediately after the weekend (farfetched? SVB showed how fast these things happen these days). And the more banks that fall, the more vulnerable would the remaining ones be, because the failure of one bank would affect the others balance sheets.


How much money will big banks make from increased deposits flowing from small regional banks? Something tells me with the spread of the overnight lending rate to the savings rate banks are paying consumers they will come out ahead on this deal.


Yes, in general banks that survive will make more money due to higher interest income.


It is by no means clear that tax payers will be paying for any of it, unless you happen to hold bank equities. This is the FDIC sticking US banks with the bill.

The equity owners of SVB were (correctly) zeroed. They were not bailed out.

The account holders were bailed out. The regulators feared the risk of contagion more than moral hazard. I'm inclined to agree.

With some luck, it will inject a bit more realism into their lobbying around regulation.


SVB no longer exists, its shareholders lost everything. It was not bailed out.


just the depositors that could have bought private insurance.


had these depositors not been made whole - all of them would have rushed through the door to get their money back and park it at Fed/money market funds/TBTF banks/etc - and it would have cause even more bank runs


Sure, but this is just a further symptom of the problem. Maybe it made sense to do a depositor bailout this time, but I don't see any reasonable structural changes that will prevent this from happening again.

Ideally we want no bank runs, confidence in the system, and banks that keep their risk profile low enough that they can survive a big chunk of their depositors deciding to take their money out. What changes have been made since SVB's failure to achieve this? What confidence do we have that another SVB won't happen next year or whenever?


SVB's failure was in risk management (duration risk mismatch and deposit concentration in tech industry), other banks seem to be fine and well diversified with depositor base.

but if people start taking money out of banks and start putting money in fed funds/money market, then these kinda problems will repeat again.

but most likely - failing banks will be just acquired by larger competitors, and thats it


I think this is the inevitable result of relaxing glass-steagall. The costs of shutting down the first line of failures will make the second line of failures.

Naturally bank shareholders should lose everything before tax payers and the last thing we should do is stop the destruction of an industry caused by its own lobbying. Its brokerage accounts for everyone..


Claw back the personal wealth of the executives when banks and hedge funds fail.

It'll never happen though. They have too much political power. The Vice documentary about the 2008 financial crisis has some interesting tidbits. They talk about how the global banking system is at risk of collapse in one part while another part says any deals that take away executive bonuses would be rejected.

Let that sink in. The US, with the most powerful government in the world, couldn't even take away executive bonuses to sell the public on a bailout plan that would save the banking system. It's crazy.


> US, with the most powerful government in the world, couldn't even take away executive bonuses to sell the public on a bailout plan that would save the banking system

Absent legislation, the United States can’t retroactively break private contracts. The proper thing to do, what we’ve done in the recent bank failures, is to break the bank that wrote those contracts.


Think of it in reverse then. The banking executive, who already have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in personal wealth, weren't willing to give up one year of bonuses to save their industry.


> banking executive, who already have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in personal wealth, weren't willing to give up one year of bonuses to save their industry

Well, they didn't need to. That was the problem. We've since fixed it by requiring clawbacks and improving the ability for the FDIC to e.g. put SVB into receivership.


> Absent legislation...

So write that legislation! The fact that such legislation in the wake of 2008 was so politically unpopular speaks volumes.


> this is the inevitable result of relaxing glass-steagall

SVB’s failure had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. They had no investment bank to speak of.


What is the mechanism by which this fee will be passed to you?


His/her bank will charge higher fees or offer lower interest.


I've never paid a fee to a bank in my life and until the last few months interest rates on savings accounts were a rounding error.


So move your money into a money market fund or other, lower-fee and/or higher-interest place to park cash.


Already done. 4.9% is lovely right now.

https://www.cit.com/cit-bank/bank/cds/no-penalty-cd


There's this somewhat odd bifurcation right now between:

- Basically zero interest rate accounts which are presumably counting on a combination of small accounts and lazy money not bothering to chase market-level interest rates and

- Banks/brokerages actively chasing people willing to park a lot of money in cash at current low-risk interest rates

4-5% may not beat inflation but it looks pretty good in a very uncertain economic environment.


CPI's latest number is 4.9% YoY and 0.4% MoM. So the VMFXX's 5.01% rate is beating the latest estimates on inflation.


In any case, you're at least very close to treading water. (And what your personal inflation rate is will vary.) Which looks pretty good compared to a lot of riskier investments right now.


I mean a MMF is not really an investment. It's a place to park your cash when you don't want to invest.

Obviously other investments are riskier in the short term, but there's less risk long term in that you aren't guaranteed to lose purchasing power as you are with a MMF.


Depending on circumstances, it would seem like "I want maintain my pile of cash at roughly its current purchasing power value" is as valid as "I want to bet on making it bigger--based on long-term trends for certain investment classes" (or some combination thereof) as investment strategies.


Except an MMF is literally not an investment. It's a form of savings.

There's nothing invalid about saving. However whether you want to invest or save has very little to do with "circumstances" and everything to do with personal inclinations and needs.


I must have missed the day in finance class when they covered the magic return/risk point where it went from being an investment to being just savings.


The debate IIRC is somewhere between 3 month bill and and 1 year notes.

MMFs that are majorly composed of overnight 1-day loans is so cash-money that when people say 'money' in finance, they usually mean MMFs.

------

Legally speaking, 3 month bills / loans to the government are considered so reliable, that they are considered money-within-a-week in various regulations. Like Savings accounts or Money Market accounts.

IE: so many 3 month bills are being traded around, that it acts pretty damn like cash in practice, like real banking regulations.

-------

Yes, there is a sliding scale of money/cash into 30 year loans.

But financers call even 1 month stuffs basically money, pretty often. A MMF with overnight loans is absolutely more cash-like than anything else.


Well, for starters, zero seems like an important point, as in if it's risk free then it's qualitatively different from something that has risk.

Even govt bonds have risk because although they have a predefined payout, their market price can fluctuate, sometimes a lot. But MMFs --- negligible risk.


DeFi enables far higher rates, but much risker.


Lots of things offer the promise of higher rates but are much riskier.


Pretty good, though locking it up in a CD could be a good or bad thing given the circumstances.

I'm talking: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

Which is 60%+ Fed Repos and the rest is US Treasuries of ~14 days of maturity or so on the average.


"No Penalty CD".

It is a 7 day lock up.

I've already 'upgraded' it from 4.85... which was a simple process of opening a new account and transferring it from the old account (all online on their website).

Funny enough, this bank is linked from the Ally website as their 'competitor' rates... https://www.ally.com/bank/no-penalty-cd/


Expect those Treasuries to crash within a month if the US defaults on debt.


I thought risky investments paid out higher interest.


Took me a few times reading this before I "got it". Excellent hilarious comment!


I've been paying attention over the last few years. These sorts of headline news things about ceilings have historically ended up magically being resolved before shit hits the fan. It sounds awful in the news and they make a big deal about it, but I think it is more for politics than it is an actual problem. I'd be super surprised that they don't work something out.


Why are you keeping piles of cash in a mega bank savings account that pays 0.01% anyway? Move it to a regional bank that isn't being assessed the fee.


If you bank with one of the institutions that is subject to this policy and you are not a multimillionaire it is highly likely that you are making a mistake that is causing you to be exploited by greedy rich people. Take an hour this weekend and find a credit union and I bet you that you will be pleasantly surprised.


Are you implying that those $16B will be passed on to account holders? How exactly?


US megacorps aren't exactly known to happily reduce profits without trying to claw them back elsewhere


What? Companies set prices to maximize profit. If charging more in fees was going to make them more money they would aready have done it.

This argument that you are using maybe didn't come directly from a corporate PR firm, but it sounds like one.


> Are you implying that those $16B will be passed on to account holders? How exactly?

Lower rates on deposits, higher rates on borrowing, more fees and more marginal accounts and branches being closed.


If a branch was profitable before, it's no less profitable to keep it open now.


Indirectly, via lower interest rates on accounts, higher interest rates on loans, higher fees on other things.


> will be paying to bail out SVB

It’s not bailing out SVB. It’s bailing out its depositors. Your broader point stands–there was a bail-out where we were promised there would be none. But unlike in the GFC, the bank itself was not bailed out.


I mean, that's what FDIC is... it's basically backing a bank's funds using the US tax payers at the end.


> $16 Billion in fees (so far!) means you and I, regular people, will be paying to bail out SVB, it's bad decisions, and it's account holder's bad decisions. Wonderful.

Worth considering is the impact on us regular people if SVB's depositors hadn't been made whole. It seems highly likely we'd all be financially less well off.

> Somehow we convinced a significant portion of the country that tax payers won't be responsible for these unprecedented bailouts. Yet, here we are.

Just to be clear: tax payers aren't going to be paying this $16.5 billion, and the intervention is not unprecedented.

Obviously, this will increase the operating costs for banks in the form of deposit insurance fees, and that will effectively be born by shareholders and customers of said banks, particularly depositors. The costs will consequently be borne proportionately to the amount of money one has on deposit. Given the wealth disparities in this country, "regular people" won't be shouldering much of the burden.

You could certainly argue that "the wealthy" will somehow find a way to transfer their costs to "regular people", but by that same logic, regular people would have been paying for the costs incurred from NOT intervening with SVB, as this was just a tiny fraction of the uninsured deposits. Beyond that, because US banks would be perceived as less stable, the operating costs for banks would have certainly increased anyway, and by far more, as US bank bonds would be devalued due to the increased risk.

The idea that "rich people who made bad decisions" are being "bailed out" by "regular people" is a misnomer. Everyone was "bailed out" by the FDIC. The fact that everyone benefits from the FDIC's intervention is what creates the problematic dynamic in the first place.


Does it seem crazy to anyone else that the FDIC is levying a “special assessment”? The I in FDIC is insurance - the fund should have enough money to cover bank failures at the rate they are expected, much like an insurance company would, not charge other banks.

This is like your car insurance company levying a fee on everyone every time someone gets in an accident. It’s not insurance, it’s transferring one bank’s losses to all others in an arbitrary manner.


If I am reading this correctly, they have enough to cover this:

> The Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) balance was $128.2 billion on December 31, 2022, up $2.8 billion from the end of the third quarter.

https://www.fdic.gov/about/strategic-plans/strategic/insuran...


No. It's not any different than an insurance company realizing that the risk that a 1 in 500 year extreme weather event has dropped to a 1 in 100 year probability and adjusted insurance rates accordingly. Silicon Valley thought leaders used social media to create a bank run on steroids, a scenario apparently unforeseen by the actuaries at banks and their regulators. So…the regulator is adjusting risk in reaction.


The FDIC is the insurer of last resort. They don't get to go bankrupt.

They also wield the authority of the federal government, which is the authority of the people, represented more or less collectively, and which is operating under the principle of maximizing social utility, in contrast to the insurance company in your metaphor which is trying to maximize profits for its shareholders.


Health insurance in the US has a concept of “deductible” and “copay” in the event of a failure; this is not dissimilar to copay.


A copay for someone else? I've never had my insurance company send me an extra bill because my neighbor got in a car accident.


You all but certainly have, though it's not usually framed like this.

Many auto insurance policies include risk indicators based on location, age, educational levels, and similar factors. If members of that cohort prove to be a higher risk than earlier actuarial models had presumed, rates increase.

That's similar in general spirit to what's happening here.


The banks are not paying insurance to insure “themselves.” They are paying insurance to insure all depositors in the banking system, so the failure event belongs to the banking system at large not the failed bank in particular.



> The FDIC said the payments would not begin until the second quarter of 2024 and would be collected over two years, translating to an annual rate of 0.125 per cent of each bank’s uninsured deposits.

This is going to be a fun one to track. I fully predict the big banks will game their own deposit holdings to not fall into this category. A year is plenty of time for them to find some loophole.


There doesn't seem to be much that they can do to game it as the calculations seem to be based on uninsured deposits. The bank doesn't control how much a depositor places in the bank.


They can easily set up accounts so that they earn lower (or no) interest over $250k, or do what Apple is doing with Apple Card savings and not even allow balances over $250k. Then the bank is effectively passing on the fee to only those unwise enough to keep more than $250k in a account.


Sure, but FDIC insurance is per depositor, per insurable account category, per institution. Someone with three different savings accounts at the same institution each with less than $250k individually but more than $250k total still only gets $250k in insurance.

EDIT: I'm not saying the system can't, for a lack of a better word, be gamed, but ultimately that requires action on the depositors end, not necessarily the bank(s).

EDIT 2: Which means that any balance over that 250k in the same category would, in theory, count towards an institution's uninsured deposit balance.


If bank reduce interest rates above $250k, it gives incentive for the depositor to use multiple banks. There could also be startups that automatically distribute deposit >$250k to 1000s of bank automatically.


> The bank doesn't control how much a depositor places in the bank.

Ha! Of course they do.

All it takes is a letter or phone call advertising a new cash management account that holds overnight treasuries. Customers can sign up and move their $250K+ deposits (which technically aren’t insured anyway) to that non-deposit account.


Not every bank is going to be able to leverage a CMA that works the additional FDIC insurance. And even then, offering incentives or products does not mean a depositor will actually utilize them.


Haven't read the article, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is taken as a percentage of the bank's uninsured deposits specifically to encourage banks to have less uninsured deposits, strengthening the resiliency of the banking system...


I swear, people will distort reality any way they can to make themselves victims of this.


Free lunch




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