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nradov 6 hours ago

You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.

As for bank runs, no one cares. The big banks no longer need retail customer deposits as a source of capital for fractional reserve lending. Modern bank funding mechanisms are more sophisticated than that.

underlipton 5 hours ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...

In which the FDIC took unprecedented action, drawing down the DIF to backstop depositors beyond the insured $250k and offering a credit facility to other banks, in order to prevent "contagion" - a panic, a bank run - which was presumed to be likely after the 3rd largest bank collapse in US history. A bank almost no one outside of California had heard of before it died.

Bank runs are serious business, and far from being something "no one cares" about, even just talking about them makes banks nervous, because they can happen to even "healthy" banks. The big banks have been undercapitalized for more than a decade, and even a moderate run on a regional institution threatens the entire system. Which is why it should be done, or at least signaled as incoming; it's good leverage.

  >You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.
The implicit, "I'll stay here, where I'm nice and secure," is delusion. People care about your outcomes even if you don't care about ours. Take the invitation to organize with others to secure your own future, to show just how much you're needed before your employer decides that you're not (however erroneously).
nradov 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You really missed the point. SVB was undone by their own failure to manage interest rate risk, and then by the actions of corporate depositors. Retail banking customers had little to do with it. Corporations certainly aren't going to participate in some sort of pointless consumer protest.

underlipton 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a liquidity problem. Retail absolutely can drop any given bank into a liquidity crunch by pulling out too many funds, too quickly. It doesn't even need to put a given bank at risk of insolvency, if the situation is read as widespread and/or growing, because as the event expands, so does the likelihood that someone else is mismanaging their books. Someone who is hooked into another institution, and another, and another. Contagion.

Anyway, corporate depositors have a duty to safeguard their capital. That means that if a bank run is underway by retail depositors, they're in line too, willing participants or not. This is why, again, even discussion of bank runs is discouraged, and their likelihood and effectiveness downplayed. They're built on turning the imperative of self-interest, which the financial industry is built on, on its head.

nradov 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Nope, you're still missing the point. SVB had a solvency problem, not just a liquidity problem. And some silly consumer protest withdrawals will never be able to cause a liquidity problem for any bank that matters.