My money market fund (VMFXX) is composed of Fed Repo notes with 13 _DAYS_ of maturity average (https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...)
A bank holding customer deposits in lol 30 _Year_ or 10 _YEAR_ treasuries is anything but safe. That's called duration risk, and congrats, they just got burned by duration risk.
What are the downsides to society if banks are less profitable? They invested in T-Bills, I don't see how that investment served society in any way.
They invested in T-Bonds (10Y or longer) and MBS (mortgages) it seems like, not T-Bills (1Y or shorter)
The distinction is extremely important in this case. If they were trading T-Bills, they would have survived. Instead, they took on much riskier T-Bonds (probably hoping to make more money).
Yet everyone keeps talking about how the money supply is causing inflation, even though there is no plausible direct connection [1] between the amount of money in some bank account somewhere and consumer prices. The bakery down the street does not look at federal reserve rates when figuring out their bread prices.
[1] I'm guessing that someone will be able to explain this to me. But keep in mind that your explanation should cover how we could have over a decade of near-zero interest rates and the respective money supply inflation without seeing any significant consumer price inflation.
Thus, you have inflation: The price of goods inflate(!) because the value of monies drops inversely to the monies in circulation.
Creating money does not automatically cause it to circulate, as the ECB and others have demonstrated between 2008 and 2022.
If we want to get deep into the thickets of finances we absolutely can, but that's not what I'm here for.
Europe, much like the US, was printing money, at a fairly steady rate from 2008 to 2020, at which point they doubled the money supply in a little over a year. That is, they printed more money in ~18 months then they had since the EU was formed.
This is a nice fiction a lot of people spout. The consequences of that are inflation or default. Inflation is very unpopular but defaulting ends the game because investors won't buy the bonds after that. There are consequences to ignoring debt.
I can think of other (political) consequences, but not economical per se, if you assume that a loan has a risk of default priced into its interest rate.
Probably more politically disastrous is that if the debt is denominated in the domestic currency, it’s likely that a substantial portion of the bond holders are domestic and they will not be happy about having their wealth confiscated.
People are forced to acquire the currency to pay their taxes or risk being assaulted by the violence of state and dispossessed of a lot of their stuff and/or freedom.
Fiscal Theory of Price Level seems to be inspired by Fiscal Theory of Money.
"The literature on the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) integrates discussion of monetary and fiscal policy, recognizing that fiscal policy can be a determinant, or even the sole determinant, of the price level"
Christopher A Sims: Paper Money
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
Ignoring the fact that elected governments do not, of course, do that.
>Why not just make the government do that directly?
If I understand, do you mean why not cut out the middle-man and have people buy the T-Bills/Bonds themselves? If so I completely agree, to some degree, that banks nowadays are nearly complete scams as far as warehousing your money, while providing near 0% interest, with the backdrop of 4 to 5+% risk free short term rates from the government as alternative.
I myself have taken out a bunch of cash and deposited into various tenors of treasuries at TreasuryDirect.gov
And many others have as well, which is why depending on which data you look at there has been a massive withdrawal of cash from commercial banks in recent months, with people either buying treasuries or putting the cash with their brokers (who are buying treasuries etc).
I don't know the answer to how this is resolved, or banks place in the economy... they are supposed to provide credit and money creation for business investment. Since the 2008 crisis, lending has been subdued... there are probably many causes for this. Banks have terrible apps, user interfaces, user experience moving money quickly (in the US) and terrible returns provided to you for lending them money (most people don't realize this is what you're doing when you deposit). So yea, they are a legacy, protected industry that scams their customers out of the spread between the treasury yields they are getting.
The alternative to banks is a credit union where you are a shareholder and their rates aren't necessary exciting either. There's a cost to maintaining infrastructure both digital and physical. Not to mention providing various financial services to shareholders.
The moving money problem is a bigger issue with the American financial system as a whole and basically the business mentally of underinvestment and "don't break what works". FedNow will hopefully reduce alot of the time delay related friction in the coming year or two that comes with ACH.
If you know you have a 10-year horizon, by all means buy treasuries instead of depositing at a bank.
And you can sell T-Bonds, they are as liquid as any other assets, the bank just lost money on it. If the T-bonds hadn't lost value they wouldn't have collapsed, they would have just sold the bonds.
National Savings & Investment Bank (NS&I) does not offer loans, but money you save with this bank is in practice just part of the country's general fund, they're paying you interest on your savings because if they borrowed that money commercially they'd have to pay interest too.
This has one obvious big advantage for the saver - it's inherently safe, you aren't saving with a bank, who might gamble your money away and then go bankrupt, if the whole country fails then it doesn't mean anything to lose the Pounds in the savings account, Pounds are now worthless anyway. Also if you live there you have more immediate problems.
Since the government owns it, it's also allowed to do things which would otherwise be illegal, at least potentially e.g. NS&I Premium Bonds are basically savings except with gambling, or scratch-offs except you get your money back if you don't win. Your deposit is safe, but instead of say 1% interest on £10 000 you might have 0.1% chance to win another £90 000 for a total of £100 000.
This is technically worse than the 1% interest but it's exciting and people buy lottery tickets so who am I to argue?
Edited to add: Somehow the word not was missed in my second paragraph during editing. Fixed now.
3.30% on an instant access account is actually pretty great (best i see elsewhere is 2.51%; i see a six month fixed term deposit at 3.28%), and getting it tax-free without having to have it in an ISA makes it even better.
What you're describing is pretty close to a "narrow bank", minus the "owned by government" part. The Fed doesn't like it for several reasons:
>The Fed raises three main objections. 3 The first is macroeconomic: The Fed worries that narrow banks could mess with the implementation of monetary policy, because if they succeed they will keep a lot of money at the Fed, increasing the size of its balance sheet. 4 They might also make other short-term interest rates (like fed funds) more volatile, because people who would otherwise participate in those markets might park their money at narrow banks instead, making it harder for the Fed to target interest rates. 5
>Second, it worries that narrow banks will take funding away from regular banks, making it harder for those banks to trade stocks and bonds (a business largely funded by repo), and maybe even making it harder to make loans:
>Third, the Fed worries that having too safe a bank would be bad for financial stability: In times of stress, everyone will flee from the regular banks to the super-safe narrow banks, which will have the effect of bringing down the regular banks.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...
Interests are not perfectly aligned.
Those statements might technically be true, but the implied conclusion (ie. that the fed is beholden to banks because of its ownership structure) is not. The federal government essentially controls the fed because the president appoints all the board members, and nearly all of its profits are paid to the treasury.
>The federal government sets the salaries of the board's seven governors, and it receives all the system's annual profits, after dividends on member banks' capital investments are paid, and an account surplus is maintained. In 2015, the Federal Reserve earned a net income of $100.2 billion and transferred $97.7 billion to the U.S. Treasury,[22] and 2020 earnings were approximately $88.6 billion with remittances to the U.S. Treasury of $86.9 billion.[23]
(Which is why bank regulation is incredibly important, because without strong regulation banks often do start to chase profit by lending to more and more risky customers, and when that unwinds you get what happened in 2008)
Because they touch money they have all sorts of woo-woo respect. Really they are just service providers like lawyers, gardeners, and doctors.
The whole public perception of the finance sector (and its own sel-regard) is backwards.
The minimum viable size of a bank increases. Small, community banks can't implement Basel III. That's why they were exempted. How SVB was in a bucket with the Bank of Jackson Hole, however, is another question.
The exemptees just need to be fucking careful with this advanced mode of operation.
And the pace of innovation in US banking was very slow, essentially stalled, for a generation from the consumer's POV
Here in Aotearoa we have ATMs on every street corner since the 1980s. All but the tiniest traders have had pos electronic transactions for nearly thirty years
Other countries are even more advanced (our banks are all like yous now, consumers now viewed as pests)
I want innovation in customer services, but what we get is innovations in financial engineering.
May they all rot...
You mean “need to have sheer luck in their gambling”.
Tails, taxpayers bail us out
> Tails, taxpayers bail us out
You're doing to have to define "bail us out".
SVB's shareholders got wiped out.
How many times will we get burned until we learned that banks will not be careful if they are given an opportunity to not be.
https://ir.svb.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx
The depositors will get their money back, with perhaps a small delay. Which is more than you can say for scams like cryptocurrency.
Play stupid games, win 70 cents on your dollar.
Meanwhile, how close is the US to making Chip-and-PIN a thing?
And who still uses cheques these days?!
> And who still uses cheques these days?!
US uses them for business-to-customer payments, especially unsolicited ones, because we don't want to give random businesses we don't know our bank account numbers.
You can pay people instantly by refunding their debit cards - that's how Uber drivers can get paid - but it's not free, which is why most transfers don't go that way.
There's no inherent information risk to giving out an account number that justifies an outdated paper-based system. Especially when one considers the accompanying fraud risk thereof.
The instant I moved to Europe, I realized just how far behind consumer banking is in the US. It's pitiful.
Yes, as well as the routing number.
> There's no inherent information risk to giving out an account number …
Of _course_ there is. In the US, the account + routing number is sufficient to perform a ACH transfer, write checks against that account, etc.
The risk is enormous.
> Especially when one considers the accompanying fraud risk thereof.
I’m assuming you misunderstood the risk when you wrote the above. It is, in fact, extremely high.
So… how does writing a check remove this risk then? That was the original point, that writing a check is safer than giving out your account number.
Not in Europe it's not, which is monodeldiablo's point: there's no inherent risk to giving out your account number. It's only the primitive US system which makes it a risk.
https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/what-country-has-the-mos...
We asked the banker what would happen if we were robbed. He said he'd just write a new one. The thief couldn't do anything with it, as it was all on name only, and the extremely low daily volume of cheques in use would mean cashing it would stand out like a sore thumb.
... now the transoceanic cable, on the other hand, that was... anemic, we'll say.
The exemptees just need to be f**ing careful with this advanced mode of operation.”
This sounds tongue in cheek I know, but SVB’s situation has created real world consequences even for me, someone who has no money tied up with them. My go-to for bonded cellular networks (so i can run a livestream for my employer, a small tech start up) had to tell all of us who use them to pause payments immediately today as this unfolded and are not taking new rentals in the meantime. They’re literally not getting paid right now. This is not a holding pattern that can last long and is highly disruptive for them and, consequentially, me. A video content guy at a small start up on nearly the other side of the country.
Really?
That is interesting. Why? How? Who else?
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/liquidity-coverage-rati...
At a typical community/regional bank, payday is just a bunch of bill entries: debit the corp account and credit the employees accounts. Meanwhile a business-focussed bank will just have huge debits every Friday without corresponding credits: those are happening at other banks.
And with a small number of account holders, it doesn’t take many actors to cause an a bank run.
Payday sealed the fate here.
I’m unsure what special services a startup needs from their bank that any other bank serving businesses couldn’t offer.
SVB was not small, but an order of magnitude smaller than the large money center banks (Citi, BofA, JPMChase).
That being said, nearly every other bank of that size submitted Dodd Frank Stress Test results to the Fed in 2022.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2022-dfast...
Somehow SVB avoided this. I don’t see this as systemic at all. The FDIC will make depositors whole and the owners and managers did a bad job and they lose. The worst possible response would be a bailout of any sort beyond ordinary FDIC receivership.
This can be done manually, with some logistical challenges.
This can also be done automatically, e.g. via CDARS.
Fun fact, if you're married, you can actually turn that into 3 * FDIC insurance limit.
- Account 1: You
- Account 2: Your spouse
- Account 3: Jointly you and your spouse
Besides common strategy in my country: have more money than 250k spread it around at multiple banks.
Basel III was introduced to force banks to be more conservative, and thus more safe. Downside: this also means bank is going to be less profitable.
European banks were forced to implement Basel III, while the US bankers managed to lobby a loophole for certain types of banks. And sure enough, SVB leveraged this loophole.
For those interested, FT Alphaville describes this in ample detail:
Silicon Valley Bank is a very American mess https://on.ft.com/3ywMURD