> Two, the tech industry, especially the VC-funded end, is forever crowing ... there has been endless puffery and chest-thumping among VCs and tech startups

When you find yourself cheering for collective punishment you should know that you are absolutely the bad guy.

I am not in fact arguing for collective punishment. I am arguing for people experiencing the consequences of their choices. The paragraph you quote is about their ardent insistence on being allowed to make those choices without interference.

What choices were made by the thousands of employees who work for the startups who can no longer pay them?

ummm.. they chose their employer?

Normally I'd think that an unfair point. We can't generally expect workers to evaluate the financial soundness of their employers. But we are talking about startups here. Everybody going in knows that most startups fail. Hopefully everybody has an exit plan.

> We can't generally expect workers to evaluate the financial soundness of their employers.

Why not? It’s like fundamental…

Because it's a problem requiring graduate-level finance knowledge? Because it's so difficult that even the professionals find it challenging? Because the companies that go under were often working to hide that even from other sophisticated players?

I don't think it is that complicated. I am surprised at the high balances in SVB though from companies that should've known better.

If you think you can reliably tell the financial soundness of companies, don't post here about it. Go trade their stocks. You'll either make a mint or you'll have a very valuable lesson.

I thought we were talking about companies that you choose to work for?

If you can do this with a company before taking a job, then you can certainly do it with other companies.

That looks to be an unlikely scenario, but let's indulge it.

Can capitalism be pretty harsh on workers? Sure. 1-2 million people get laid off or let go every month, and it's been that way for a long time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL

Does that suck? Speaking from experience, yes. Should the federal government subsidize startups and/or their funders to save a few thousand jobs? Absolutely not.

If we want to spend billions on a better social safety net, let's do it for everybody, not some unprofitable companies whose investors don't see them as worth saving.

Are those employees of companies whose business model is "driving artists out of business by large-scale copyright infringement and automated drawing based on it?", for example?

The text I quoted applies to a tiny number of people, few or even none of whom might actually be caught in SVB (as they may have managed to exit first!). But unless I'm misreading it's being used to justify that the harm was deserved by a vastly larger class.

So how did you manage your treasury when you were running your businesses? Did you split it 10 ways? Did you buy t bills?

This was back when A rounds were much more modest in size. We put it in one of the largest and therefore most highly regulated banks, the ones that now have to meet Basel III standards. If we'd had more money, we would have put it in 2 banks. A solution that would have been enough for almost everybody here, as the main thing causing a risk of not making payroll is the way the FDIC is locking up a good chunk of the uninsured funds while they sell off SVB's assets.

> bad treasury management

There are lots of ways for a startup to die. If you have $2m cash do you really want to manage (2/0.25) bank accounts, adopt all that administrative overhead, just to reduce your probability of death by bank failure, when possibly the added overhead may increase your overall probability of death because now you are distracted and unfocused on the things that are far more likely to kill you?

> If we're going to spend billions of dollars on improving the safety net, I think startups are way, way down the list of priorities.

This is first order thinking which increases systemic risk by undermining trust. The probability of future bank runs goes up.

> Three, among startups, market-driven disruption is practically a religion. Startups destroy existing companies all the time. Quite often it's an explicit goal, where startup X lists existing players A and B as companies whose lunches will get eaten because they are making bad choices. > Four, there has been endless puffery and chest-thumping among VCs and tech startups how their genius justifies pocketing billions and billions of dollars when times are good. Best and brightest, incredibly hard workers, blah blah blah. Including a special tax exemption for VCs, because they're just such amazing financial wizards.

You're making broad generalizations about a large group of heterogeneous agents. You're also using language that's full of moral judgement (revenge, disgust) instead of focusing on stuff that matters to the economy or to everyday people.

> But it's not a problem for taxpayers to solve.

Why not? Taxpayers exist to fund things that are thought to be in the public good. And isn't it a lack of imagination to think that taxpayers are the only way to solve this? What about clawback of executive compensation or shareholder dividends?

I just love that all the people who have discovered treasury management this week think that a) the only way to do that is keep $250k in n accounts, and b) that even if that's what people did, it would be so incredibly burdensome.

If startups want to take on bank risk, great. If they don't, also great, and there are many ways for them to do that. They are allowed to manage their risks as they see fit. If they can't, that is not a problem for taxpayers to solve. I get why some people here are pitching "socialism, but only for would-be billionaires", but I promise it's not a winning proposition in the wider world.

> If they can't, that is not a problem for taxpayers to solve.

You haven't made the case that the cost doesn't justify the reduction in systemic risk, let alone the immediate economic fallout of otherwise good businesses going bust. To make that case you would first have to outline what the cost would be, then you would have to explain why that cost is too high relative to the benefit. Both of those steps are missing in your argument. No attempt has been made to quantify the cost or the benefit.

So far it sounds like a moral judgment. They made a mistake (in your opinion), they as a group have tended to be be arrogant, therefore they deserve to suffer the consequences. I don't care for moral judgments, they are uninteresting. Explain it in terms of costs and benefits to the economy and to people.

I don't have to make the case. The status quo, developed over literal centuries of bank regulation, is generally to let depositors take a haircut. Because depositors having skin in the game is an important check on the risk levels at for-profit banks.

If people want to argue for infinite free deposit insurance for the rich, they're the ones who need to make the case that the increase in moral hazard and increased taxpayer burden is worth if for the public to take on.

But if there's some sort of support-the-businesses goal in here, I think it's better to just argue for a government corporation that's a non-profit deposit-only bank that takes no risk and pays no interest. Then, if you're correct that there are a large number of safety-seeking people with millions in cash who just want to focus on entrepreneuring, they'll have an option that has zero failure risk.

I expect if we created that, though, it would see very little use, because people are happy to take risks when they think they can get away with them. And quite a large number of people are apparently also willing to ask Uncle Sugar for a bailout when their gamble doesn't come up like they wanted.

> The status quo, developed over literal centuries of bank regulation, is generally to let depositors take a haircut

Only if you go by common wisdom pre-Great Depression, which helped cause the Great Depression. But the opposite lessons have been learned since. That's why the FDIC was created in the aftermath of the Great Depression. It's the basis of the Nobel Prize winning Diamond–Dybvig model which inspired the TARP in the GFC which actually returned a profit to taxpayers. If depositors have too much skin in the game, it creates the potential for a bank run, which benefits nobody and harms everybody.

> increase in moral hazard

Which is where regulations need to come in. That's the bargain. You get FDIC guarantees, and I get to regulate you. It's a better bargain than the old wild west of bank runs and financial collapse.

Anyway, depositors as agents aren't good mediators of a bank's risk. There are too many informational asymmetries for that to be a good mechanism to rely on.

I am not saying we should rely on it. I'm saying rich depositors having some skin in the game is a valuable component of a for-profit banking system. And it's hardly ancient thinking to suggest that financially sophisticated players should use a little of that sophistication when picking a bank. You could read Bair's "Bull by the Horns" for somebody who understood the 2008 crisis very well but had big concerns about the moral hazard that bailouts create.

If the rich really want a risk-free bank, I'm all for the government creating one. No loans, no interest, no profit, just deposits and withdrawals, unlimited guarantee.

But I expect that won't happen, because the rich don't actually want pure safety. They want to privatize the gains from risk and socialize the losses. And the more they come to think that's achievable by, say, hysterically encouraging bank panics, the more we'll suffer for it.

> moral hazard that bailouts create.

The moral hazard that the GFC bailouts created mostly pertained to bailing out shareholders and executives, not bailing out depositors. Let's be careful to make this distinction.

There is some marginal added moral hazard from guaranteeing deposits, you are correct, but I believe this should be counteracted by regulation, executive compensation clawback laws, etc. We have learned from the Great Depression, the GFC, Diamond-Dybvig, that the systemic risk of bank runs isn't worth the marginal reduction in moral hazard from not guaranteeing deposits. If you don't have trust and confidence among people (and businesses, not just the "rich" in the abstract) that their money is safe in a bank, then all you need is social media panic and you can cause a financial crisis for no reason. This is a risk especially now in the age of social media.

The $250k amount was implemented because they thought it was enough to stop these kind of bank runs. After what we saw with SVB, we need to update our model of reality. $250k was proven to not be enough.

Taxpayers won't pay for anything. If there are any losses, it'll be socialized amongst other banks. I don't see the issue. The alternative of risking more bank runs seems a lot worse.

Approximately any business with this much cash has a rich person running things. So yes, let's stick with "the rich" as the group of interest.

Socializing the losses among other banks is not getting paid directly by taxpayers, but the money comes from somewhere. Making good banks cover bad banks just creates new moral hazard.

The basic notion of our current system is that for-profit banking is a generally good business and that we just need to limit systemic risk. Your thesis is apparently that for-profit banking is essentially unsound. That's not an argument for a bit of fiddling with the regulations. It's an argument to end for-profit banking.

Which, personally, I'm all for. Many people are claiming they just want their bank to be a utility, a magic mattress to stuff their money in. In which case, let's make banking deeply boring, and put the hundreds of billions per year in profits to better societal use.

> Making good banks cover bad banks just creates new moral hazard.

This misses something crucial. Socializing the losses among banks reduces the incentive for the industry to pursue lobbying efforts that are misaligned with the general public. It also directly refutes the wrong narrative that has been floating around that it's going to be poor little taxpayers bailing out the fatcats yet again.

> Your thesis is apparently that for-profit banking is essentially unsound. That's not an argument for a bit of fiddling with the regulations. It's an argument to end for-profit banking.

I disagree. Many industries need active government involvement to align them with the public good. Absent regulations and oversight, factories would be dumping waste in the street and rivers. Are factories "essentially unsound"? Just because we need government involvement to remove the "essential unsoundness" of factories, doesn't mean that I think it would be good for all factories to be shut down.

If you eliminate the FDIC, guess what, banks will still be profitable, just like they were in the 19th century, and just like factories would be profitable if we eliminated all environmental oversight. Only we'll get a terrible financial crisis every so often.

> So yes, let's stick with "the rich" as the group of interest.

Let's not. If we are talking about systemic risk and economic contagion, using the word "businesses" is better because it makes it clear what would happen if we follow your prescription. If we use the word "rich" (which many would assume to mean "rich individuals" since that's the context this word is often used in), we're playing rhetorical hide the ball with the consequences.

> Socializing the losses among banks reduces the incentive for the industry to pursue lobbying efforts that are misaligned with the general public.

That's not true. Individual banks will push for lower regulations because their execs want a chance at fat profits that they get to take a slice of. Just like SVB did.

>It also directly refutes the wrong narrative that has been floating around that it's going to be poor little taxpayers bailing out the fatcats yet again.

It does not.

Here the taxpayers are not directly bailing out anybody. But they are backstopping it, and have increased the risk they will have to to directly pay in the future. And they are indirectly doing so, because anybody with a bank account, which is basically everybody, is going to be paying more for loans or getting less in interest. If you'd like to hear an actual banker explain that, last night's Marketplace had a segment talking with a regional bank CEO where she talks about why she's not happy with having to pay for somebody else's losses.