Yes. Though as a small nitpick, I wouldn't describe capital requirements as 'assets you need to keep on hand'.

No matter your capital structure, all your liabilities will be matched by assets. What matters is that after your accounting for your fixed liabilities, like deposits, you still have plenty of total assets left over to have a thick equity cushion to absorb losses.

In accounting terms, equity is also a liability. But it's a very benign one, as your shareholders can't demand their money back.

There are other forms of liabilities that act like equity in their ability to absorb losses. But equity is the simplest and generally the most import one.

Wow, I never thought of / heard anyone explain equity as a liability to pay to shareholders. It’s brilliant!

You might like to read up on the very basics of accounting. There's lots of other interesting concepts there.

See https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... for an intro.

Just a small comment on this:

To me, accountants have a better grip on reality than economists. It's an accountant who taught me real economics (I was originally pursuing a math degree with economy as a 'minor' (not really how it's working in my country but close enough)). I had to unlearn some of what I learned in my first year, but I had a way better grip on how money work after that (and decided to create value and changed course).

Yes. Well, carpenters have an even better grip on reality.

Accountants and economists are doing different things. Both fields are useful, and there's some small overlap between the two.

Many people could benefit from learning some 'rationalised' accounting, ie accounting without the accumulated historical accidents and tax dodges. (Those are also interesting. But less as a description of a reality, and more in the same vein that the Talmud is interesting.)

But orthodox economic theory goes against most thing i learned. To be honest, i really thought it didn't matter, that macroeconomics was on its own, and that economists are valid expert to listen to. We were still in eurozone crisis, and while i thought "This plan doesn't make much sense" when the Troika laid out what Greece should do, GDP and socioeconomic markers were not stuff i learned or cared about.

And then like 5 years ago, i learn about MMT, read about it, disagree on some points, but it overall make much, much more sense and si way closer to reality than Friedman theories to me. It seems like macroeconomics do follow the stuff i learned when i wanted to become a quantitative analyst or whatever (i only wanted to do math tbh, and didn't follow finance classes that much).

And then during Covid we have all those "expert" economists who start to talk everywhere. But now, i am sure they are talking out of their own asses. They had now idea of what production is. The simple idea that production is linked with energy is novel for them. They probably are useful, like sociologists are useful, but i'd like to hear them on medias as much as i hear sociologists. Or even less, since i do think sociologists have real-world application to their thesis, for harm reduction during stampede. Let's say as much as medievalists historians.

The experts are the ones who engineered decades of low interest rates so their buddies can get cheap loans and play financial games with the economy. They've never been trustworthy.

MMT is both novel and correct. The problem is that the novel parts aren't correct, and the correct parts aren't novel.

Have a look at https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2021/Sumnermodernmo... for MMT.

I suggest having a look at market monetarism. See eg https://marketmonetarist.com/2015/07/14/the-euro-a-monetary-...

What kind of orthodox economy theory have you had a look at?

They relaxed the need for a capital conservation buffer, too. These actions were part of the Fed's response to the market panic at the onset of the pandemic, and you can read a bit about their reasoning in their own press release:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

Capital requirements are complicated. There are different types of equity and assets are risk-weighted, but treasuries and the types of bonds SVB bought are generally given the lowest risk-weightings.

Funny that they didn't deem T-Bonds to be high risk given that it was they who crashed the value of those T-Bond by increasing interest rates.

You identified the root cause of this whole thing. Long-term bonds get preferential treatment in the risk-based capital calculation because they have low default risk, which allows banks to run with thinner equity capital, even though they're exposed to high interest rate risk and have a portfolio highly concentrated in one high-risk industry. Capital ratios don't adequately account for actual risk.

Yes. That's (part of) why FDIC is a bad idea: it partially insulates depositors from the need to monitor what their bank is doing.

In banking, we want a flight to quality.

And the FAA is a bad idea because it insulates travelers from the need to monitor what their plane is doing?

Maybe? You could replace the FAA with voluntary certification. People could demand the same standards as the FAA enforces.

Let me bite the bullet:

Flying is arguably way too safe. In the sense that flying could compromise a bit on safety, and still be much safer than cars. If that compromise would lead to lower costs and thus prices, perhaps more people would fly and fewer would drive; leading to better safety on average. Despite flying becoming less safe.

Never thought I would hear someone making that argument. You think we should let more people die in plane crashes so that flying is cheaper?

We already know cheap flying with current safety standards is economically viable, with costs approaching the cost of fuel; see low cost airlines like Ryanair. So the most effective way to lower prices is for airlines to downgrade amenities and services onboard.

Let me bite here.

I think flying could be made cheaper and massively more convenient by getting rid of airport security the way it is done right now. Imagine planes being boarded like trains: there might be a security tradeoff but it would be offset by the massive time benefit for everyone involved. I know I would take that risk, I consider my own time to be more worthy than TSA considers it to be

I don't think anyone is arguing about security to board a plane. They're talking about maintenance requirements and safety requires for when a plane is in flight. Things like airplane inspections.

I'm talking about all aspects.

As an example: planes almost never crash. Which is great! So you could drop the requirement to carry life-vests, without compromising safety numbers.

(If you want, you can invest 50% of the cost savings into eg anti-malaria nets, and you'd come out way ahead in terms of lives saved.)

Similarly, airplane seats are massively over-engineered. You could loosen restrictions there, and save weight and thus costs.

I think Japan might already have different domestic regulations there. I remember being on a domestic flight between Kobe and Tokyo, and the seats in economy class used a lot of mesh over aluminium frame or so. They looked a lot lighter (and also more breathable) than your typical airplane seats. See https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZDWQTNMB93mQs5Yz5 for a picture that I took.

I also agree with vlack-vingaard, but they already gave some good examples.

This is true, we could definitely do with less "compulsory participatory theatre" at airports.

That said, the FAA != TSA. We like the FAA. They solve actual problems.

> could replace the FAA with voluntary certification

How does that work when a plane lands on my house?

That one post seems to say, too bad, you die but it's for a good cause because two other people didn't die in a car crash.

Essentially, yes.

It's very similar to why we allow cars to crash so much in the first place. To paraphrase JumpCrisscross:

> How does that work when a [car runs me over]?

My guess is that you have two states of equilibrium. One is that accidents happen all the time. The other is that accidents are extremely rare. Both states can exist, but the middle ground is rare and impossible to engineer. The error in safety margins of overlapping complex systems is just too great.

That's a very abstract argument, and doesn't take into account any special features of planes.

So I can say: I just want planes to be as safe as, say, trains. (Or whatever other form of transportation is safer than individual cars, but not as over-burdened as planes. Perhaps busses?)

FDIC insulates customers, but it does not at all insulate the banks; if a bank fails, it fails, FDIC or no. So it doesn't at all remove the incentive for banks to avoid failure by not making poor investments in the same way that, say, a bailout might.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing, and the current cap on insured deposits is a nice balance.

Small depositors aren't finance pros, they don't have the training or network to monitor bank management, so we protect them from rogue management.

Large depositors can and should worry about their bank's solvency, so we focus their minds by leaving their deposits uninsured.

Unfortunately, when large depositors catch a whiff of insolvency, they don't help fix the problem, they're first to pull their deposits and leave everyone else to pay the bill.

So we should treat them as we treat creditors in a bankruptcy, and claw back the cash they were able to withdraw in the days leading up to the bank's closure.

It's a good idea: it does not protect shareholders at all.

We want more people in the financial system to be aware of risks and pro-actively deal with them. That includes depositors.

(And really skittish depositors could switch to banks that only invest their deposits in eg government bonds. Which are probably about as safe as FDIC insurance.)

Idk I think retail depositors should be comfortable leaving their money anywhere that’s fdic insured and it’s the bank shareholders that should have to monitor what they’re doing.

We want more monitoring in the financial system, not less.

Otherwise you could make the same argument you just made, and expand it to: shareholders should be comfortable, it should be regulators (or someone else) that should be monitoring, etc.

Well, it was their interest risk, not their credit risk, that caused the problem here.

But it's an interesting thought.

Isn't cash kept on hand the relevant attribute here? Whether they're solvent or not, they ran out of cash to meet withdrawals.

What I don’t understand is why they weren’t restored as part of the effort to tamp down inflation, and instead the fed just raised rates. Seems like that should’ve been the first move.

My little brain sees this as a reason for failure here.

SVB had liquid assets (bonds) that it could sell to meet the demands of the depositors, but those assets fell in value creating losses. The bank was forced to crystalise those losses because it had no cash buffer to fall back on.

If some substantial part of the liquidity had been held as cash this wouldn't have happened.

No. This week, the treasuries and other assets in capital are effectively cash equivalents.

The worst part of it, is that once interest rates started raising and they started seeing the obvious (but not critical!) impact on their long-maturity bonds, they simply could have switched to shorter-maturity bonds and be totally fine.

But they preferred to gamble.