skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the bank is actually insolvent.

> On March 8, 2023, the Bank announced a loss of approximately $1.8 billion from a sale of investments (U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities). On March 8, 2023, the Bank's holding company announced it was conducting a capital raise. Despite the bank being in sound financial condition prior to March 9, 2023, investors and depositors reacted by initiating withdrawals of $42 billion in deposits from the Bank on March 9, 2023, causing a run on the Bank. As of the close of business on March 9, the bank had a negative cash balance of approximately $958 million. Despite attempts from the Bank, with the assistance of regulators, to transfer collateral from various sources, the Bank did not meet its cash letter with the Federal Reserve. The precipitous deposit withdrawal
has caused the Bank to be incapable of paying its obligations as they come due, and the bank is now insolvent.

Source: https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2023/03/DFP...
"It just sounds like a big scam. Why do private bankers get to create money and decide who gets it? It feels like there has to be a better way."

It's a time-shift. That's all.

You can absolutely run an economy - and a culture - without leverage and even without debt.

In such an environment it will take multiple lifetimes to accumulate a single lifetimes worth of provision and security ... and we all decided we wanted to provide and secure within our own lifetimes.

... and then we decided we wanted that before we had grandchildren, and then before we even had children.

We're time-shifting and this instability (and, in many ways, incomprehensibility) is the price we pay for it.
Well, everything was fine as long as deposits were ballooning.
How do you think it's going to be monetized, if not by ads?
Didn’t SVB directly cause the bank run that killed them though? It wasn’t some externally driven event outside the scope of risk management. The assets were fine but the high duration was the risk. They took it purposely and lost billions when their risky bets turned against them. The emergency equity raise and sale attempts were desperation, and seen as such.

Doesn’t feel much different than a yield farming crypto bank going under when they are forced to fire-sale thinly traded sh*tcoins and take a beating.
These issues are all going to be at business banks (and even larger banks that do both business and normal are often actually separate entities).
This resonates with me on multiple levels.

I do feel even when scoping large projects that it is difficult to hold on to all of the pieces. I split it into chunks I can reason about and then (sometimes fearfully) return to the bigger picture. By the end of the project I can see all of the mistakes I made fumbling in the dark, but I’m not sure I could have managed more at the time that I did it.

I also feel this way about socializing at work. There’s something maslowian about it, when you are uncertain if you’re going to make it, it feels perilous to join socials. They’ll never fire me for not being social enough, is the message that fires through my brain at least. Though I’m sure social anxiety plays a role here as well.
It seems to me that there is an upper limit to a bank where they just cannot do business efficiently. If a bank has more deposits than they can grow their loan book, they’ve crossed that line. This bumps up against the too-big-to-fail problem we had in 2008 as well. If the banks can’t manage their growth, perhaps they should be broken up and/or have limits placed on their size.
OT: is there a good template for making quick reference cards / 1 pagers?
I'd just use a calculated virtual column that you calculate at the queryset retrieval time. (Note I am not an Django expert, more of a hack).

https://www.appsloveworld.com/django/100/228/add-calculated-...
1. I don't have much to gain from such a thing, but someone in the know might have tremendous amount to gain. Hence the `if anyone wants to fund it`. It would have to be worth my while.

2. Yes, I am that good and could certainly build it. My tech is magic. I can turn any complex domain into the simplest form possible.
Understand you (dear OP) are angry about this, but agree with the above. You'll have to wait for assessment, justice or vengeance. The reward for your strategic waiting will be peace of mind.
I’m actually experimenting with building one of those- the problem is the forces involved compared to the irrigator which is basically just suspending water pipes over the ground
Helluva day to have deposit problems due to presumably technical issues
True, but can you imagine having rent money in your account when the bank collapses...

edit: apparently getting your money is fast and easy
Most know of them, but would have absolutely no idea how large they are.

Off the top of my head, I guess the largest are:

* JPMorgan

* Goldman

* Wells Fargo

* BoA
Why makes Tether a fraud?
Can someone recommend a good adblocker for iOS/Safari? I have Firefox Focus, Hush and KaBlock installed but still get a lot of these popover style "ads".
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.
Yeah I had noticed it a few days ago and realised there was something special going on.
Can you explain, with a focus on how banks and money movements work, why this is a disaster? I'd assume this would be Christmas--Best day of the year, for a bank accepting migrating customers!
> due to good old regular banks doing what they do best: making customers deposits disappear.

What would you estimate is the total value of customer deposits that banks have loss in failure over the last say 30yrs?
Of course, the actual best bad option would have been to just wait and lower interest rates if they must in the mean time.
oh yeah the well known nazi truckers of Canada...

Don’t forget the farmers nazi, the nurses nazi, the little kids nazi, the immigrant dark skin nazi.

The oppression clearly came from the government, it’s high time to wake up.

At this point I don’t know if this is a parody position or you really believe it.
As a programming hobbyist, one syntax I really like in Python, compared to C# and JS I've used, is it's for-in loop.

90%+ loops I used in my coding is to iterate elements in a list-like object. It feels very natural to use "for x in arr: do_sth(x)". And the same pattern can be reused with your typical "step increase by 1" loop by using `for i in range(LEN)`, instead of having to memorize another different pattern of `for (i=0; i<LEN; i++)`.

I particularly hate JS's forEach structure. for one, it doesn't follow how I think, and it's different from the other form of loops. And for two, I hate to type these pesky symbols (`a.forEach(e=>{doSth(e);})`) than just word(s).

Furthermore, JS also introduced `for in` and `for of`, which are great, but they're somewhat counterintuitive to my taste. You use `for ele of array` and `for index in array`, sounds fair. To iterate keys of objects, you use `for ... in`, but there is no `for ... of`. To make things worse, not all Array-like objects even support it. I find myself constantly "re-discover" (by that I mean I've google'd it multiple times before) the trick of things like `[...arr]`, and I hate it.

Some disclaimer: I know above is purely my preference, and not trying in anyway to say one is superior than the other. And I imagine for experienced programmers, they probably don't even think of all of these when using, it's just muscle memory. But for me, someone who code in Python/JS about half and half, I still struggle with, and have to google, basic syntax and structure in JS frequently, while I can do similar things without thinking in Python since when I was very new to the language. (And I know Python didn't invent these syntaxes.)
It’s probably not material to the overall picture, but just for accuracy, the wording of this is inaccurate - “As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital”

Capital has a special meaning to banks, and deposits are absolutely not capital from their point of view of the bank (they are from the point of view of the depositor). To the bank, deposits are on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.

A bank’s capital is only equity put in by shareholders and retained profits from previous years. This is important, because how much a bank can lend is only determined by the amount of capital they have, not the amount of deposits (since deposits are on the wrong side of the balance sheet for lending from).
As rates go up, those mortgages will become less valuable (because they pay a lower interest rate than new loans will). At the same time, rates going up means the bank is going to have to pay more in interest to depositors, meaning they will need to offload assets to maintain their margin requirements.

This is why commercial banks tend to not hold on to the loans they originate any more, and instead sell them to funds. There is correlated risks for the banks, where their assets become less valuable at the exact time they need to sell them. Banks don’t like to hold mortgages for this reason.
Why shouldn't they have to worry? FDIC insurance limits are hardly uncommon knowledge. I have more than $250K dollars and I certainly worry about how best to manage it.
Or open at two of the 2big2fail - the chance that both go t-bills up at the same time is very low (and the one that doesn’t go bankrupt can provide the liquidity until the other resolves).
I’m sure some people would find this overbearing, but to me this sounds like an exceptional manager.
Can't they claim the money back if you withdrew shortly before the insolvency anyways?
I don't know the full story behind this; but if, as you say, the national government had to go behind Quebec's back to enact basic civil liberties, that says more about Quebec than the government. Using it as a defense does more harm than good to your case.
Learn what GoodRx is, what it does, how it works.
You may be so young, you don’t take pills. So ask a relative 60+, “What did you pay for Y Rx?” Then, see if you can beat it w GoodRx.
I also have more appreciation for having to make decisions I know will be derided. I feel bad for some of my derision when I was an IC. Not for all of them but definitely some.
> The good news is that USDC has 74% of their assets in short dated US treasuries (weighted average duration is 36 days).

Do you have any idea what kind of yield they get on these and what happens to that money? I've never been able to find any info about that.
Well, "fuck them" is not "fuck the bank"-- the bank is just a ghostly outline of all the other people's money they contain. So really, you're saying "fuck you other people!" -- maybe that's not your intent! If so, think carefully before you reply next time! :) ;p xx ;p
The whole system is basically built on "putting money to work" as quickly as possible. Money sitting in "storage" just isn't useful to anyone.

Most of the economy relies on an expectation that a service you provide now will be paid off in the next 30, 60, 90 days.
That is true for every bank. Know that in such a scenario NO bank can virtually back $45B in withdrawals.
That doesn’t say donor accounts were frozen.

There appears to be little evidence that donors had their accounts frozen. Accounts receiving those donations were.
The transfers are settled in central bank reserves, so the net change of assets and liabilities should actually be zero for deposits coming in.
> Or not. Last month, Columbia Property Trust defaulted on about $1.7 billion worth of mortgages

“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem”
This looks pretty awesome! I am seeing an error when I try to rank things - is something temporarily broken?
> (Yes, this is a gross over-simplification)

This isn't really an over-simplification as it is wrong. When someone deposits $1m in the bank, the bank's assets increase by $1m in cash, while liabilities also increase by $1m and owners' equity is unaffected. The problem is that for interest-bearing deposit accounts, those liabilities increase over time, which decreases owners' equity in the absence of a sufficiently appreciating asset (such as a good loan or cash flow-generating security). Further, the bank has certain operational costs that must be paid, and investors must make some return or they'll pull capital from the bank (that's a simplification for publicly traded banks like SVB). In practice, it seems that banks need about 3 percentage points above the interest rate they pay on deposits to cover these costs, based on the typical spread between the Prime rate and the Federal Funds rate, though I imagine this necessary yield has a much higher variance for smaller banks.

When interest rates were effectively zero and their deposits increased by a huge amount, SVB decided to buy long-term bonds w/ 1.5% interest to cover the extra liability over time so that assets would grow with liabilities. Then interest rates went up. Cash assets stopped growing, but liabilities remained the same, so they started selling their bonds. Bonds lose value when interest rates increase, so their bonds sold for a loss, decreasing asset values. In the last 48 hours, depositors got spooked. SVB's equity effectively went negative, since asset values decreased below outstanding liabilities. That's typically when the FDIC steps in to liquidate a bank.

For banks, assets must in general be growing faster than liabilities. If the bank experiences a situation where assets are not growing relative to liabilities, they need to have sufficient capitalization (i.e. owners' equity) to weather the storm.
>owned in big part by Coinbase

How much of Circle is owned by Coinbase?
> I don't see why this would be hackernews-worthy

Garbage is submitted literally constantly, but some stuff is just upvote-bait, and the mods are pretty lax about pushing anything off the front page unless it particularly irks them
That would be a "hack" akin to inventing money or creating endless liabilities for FDIC. That's obviously--to me--not how this is going to work! :) xx ;p
That's on time.
Wonder Studio: this AI-powered tool might be a preview of the future of VFX
> The cpu is then used to arbitrage value in the dedicated services like lambda and others

This could be only the case is t* instances?
I learned the hard way that CPU misses can add even 30% of request latency, especially when you often do I/O eg to external services like db/Redis/etc

I didn't notice such behaviors on AWS.
but when thinking about it, I read somewhere that one reason they have dedicated CPUs is for partitioning CPU cache so it's not shared between VMs. so maybe with some tricks they could get some free compute without side effects?
If they lost all of that USDC would depeg to $0.92. As of my comment it has already depegged and is worth $0.9921.

Meanwhile Tether has is trading much higher than usual at $1.0294.
I suspect the real reason for her making that conjecture was to nerd snipe a bunch of professors into discussing eating ass
You jest but that’s pretty much exactly how Russia sees it.

It’s also a pretty ridiculous comparison at the same time. China suffered a century of invasions from western powers from Britain to Japan, had a several hundred year dynasty collapse, and fought a civil war for over 20 years.

China is becoming more belligerent as it has risen in power, but the ink spilled about its actions/outside threats vastly outstrips reality.
He learnt from the experience
Can you please make your substantive points without snark and name-calling? The latter break the site guidelines and your account looks to have been making a habit of that. We ban such accounts and I don't want to ban you because you've clearly got some good points—so if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are many ways to avoid that.

Agreed with the first part, amazing how quickly Tan and Sacks turned to government for a handout. If they get one, that will only incentivize bigger problems next time.
Matt Levine’s newsletter today assumes FDIC will forcefully step in to avoid repercussions down the road

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-10/startu...

> One obvious question is: If you are “another, healthy bank” working through this weekend to buy SVB and assume its deposits, how much would you pay for the assets, which were worth $212 billion in December? 8 I am pretty sure the answer is higher than $8 billion, the amount of insured deposits: The FDIC will not be on the hook for the insured deposits. The $15 billion of FHLB advances are also quite senior and will presumably be no problem to pay back.

> I would also guess — not investing or banking advice! — that the answer will also turn out to be higher than $188 billion, which is the total amount of deposits plus FHLB advances. I say this not because I have done a detailed analysis of SVB’s assets but because it seems bad for the FDIC to wind up a big high-profile bank in a way that causes significant losses for depositors, including uninsured depositors. There was a run on SVB in part because there hasn’t been a big bank run in a while, and people — venture capitalists, startups — were naturally worried that they might lose their deposits if their bank failed. Then the bank failed.

> If it turns out to be true that they lose their deposits, there could be more bank runs
As I recall they allowed themselves to place crazy risky trades, using the entire customer base deposited funds as collateral.
DontBreakDebian: Advice for New Users on Not Breaking Their Debian System
Every sophisticated bond investor knows about duration risk. We expect banks to be sophisticated in that way. This was a really boneheaded investment to make at a time when interest rates were at historic lows.
The posts above are incorrect about how banks work, but your question is spot on. Actually, banks always lend out money they don’t have - they can’t actually “lend deposits”. The risk of what banks do is why banking licenses are hard to get and it’s so regulated.

This primer from the Bank of England is very clear: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
The underlying problem in the 08 collapse was poor/non-existent underwriting of the mortgages and those loans being rated AAA when packaged in an MBS. When the economy slowed just a bit people started defaulting because originators were writing NINJ (No Income, No Job) loans, something that is illegal today.

This situation today has nothing to do with the failure of the MBS'S to payout like 08.
“Just to be clear, a financial contribution either through a crowdsourced platform or directly, could result in their bank account being frozen?” Conservative MP Philip Lawrence asked Department of Finance Assistant Deputy Minister Isabelle Jacques.

“Yes,” she replied.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/even-small-donation-t...
I think the lesson to learn here is that perhaps he should have known that kind of call for community spirit and non-contractually obligated decency should not be expected from a bunch of silicon valley CEOS. And VCs.
Why 30 minutes if you could just have a single auction per day?
No, because you need to value the bonds at their current market value, which would presumably be 80 MM. The fact that you believe an asset will get you a certain amount of money doesn’t mean it’s worth that now.
I was confused. Circle and Coinbase created Centre and Centre's website say Centre created the USDC stablecoin. Circle and Coinbase each own 50% of Centre. I don't know if Coinbase also owns a part of Circle or not.
This is simply not a risk that most people would even consider worth thinking about.

Yes, banks fail. However, the large, reputable ones fail few and far between. If you're a seed/Series A startup, you'd be much better off focusing on creating value. Your far more likely to fail to find PMF than you are to have your bank go belly up.
I wish Python had arrow operators like Clojure. Often times, chaining several functions leads to a mess like this:

fun1(fun2(fun3(xyz, 10)), 12)

I expect it to be more like this:

xyz | fun3(_, 10) | fun2(_, 12) | fun1

Unfortunately, Python creators reserved "|" for dictionary merging :/
That seems like a terrible moral hazard for the bank to just go and gamble any deposits
Of course it is lower than 100%. Our whole modern banking system is built on this fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
Well...it's text, can you really tell if it's a joke when it's not someone you know? Seems the callous might just be instead to start hanging on this poor soul for doing something bad when maybe they're just expressing how they are right now. Extreme situations can make people extremely disinhibited and honest. Better to err on the side of caution and not give this poor soul more burden next time! :) ;p
That's not why there's a tech bank run. The reason there's a tech bank run is because VCs, and the companies they own are like geese. They fly in a triangle.

Thiel tells his startups to bank-run SVB, and they bank-run SVB, and all the other VC start telling their firms to follow suit. It's all herd mentality among an undiversified group of customers (startups all of which are hit hard by raising interest rates), which is perfect for a bank run.
This link [0] is useful for getting context on what backs USDC, and this link [1] shows what backs the 74%. Looks like an average yield of ~4.4%?

[0] https://www.circle.com/en/transparency

[1] https://www.blackrock.com/cash/en-us/products/329365/
React hook to detect component mount, unmount and re-renders
There kind of is - formerly called CDARS, but it goes by IntraFi now. You establish a “home” bank and they dump your balance into their network and they set up the hundreds or thousands of other accounts. It’s dumb and expensive and shouldn’t be necessary..

https://www.intrafinetworkdeposits.com/
> I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair.

None of it's fair.

A servile government, with license to use force/incarceration, bent on defending putrid industrial system that hordes as much rights for itself as it can? That has extended copyright to 70 years, by crook & by hook? The whole thing is a sham, a disgrace to the human spirit, a scourge upon the earth.

The damage numbers are all made up. These people get punishments exceeding those of violent crimes. It's all deeply unfair & unjust & immoral. The system debases itself by being a mean, cruel, unjust bastard with no remorse to adults. It's pathetic & weak & servile to the worst aspects of society (corporate cultures). Asshole Jack Valenti piece-of-shit RIAA lawyers & trashbag DRM systems are a heavy foot of injustice stomping down on the face of society, forever & ever. It's all woefully biased brutally against society & social possibility, for the greed of very few.

Alas there's seemingly next to no representation for the human cause. Patents & IP rights grow, & seemingly little curbs them, ever. The proprietarization of knowledge & intellect ever expands, a system unable unwilling & uninterested in checking the expansion of intellectual ownership. Fucking shit show man. Fucking awful. Fuck all this.
What if open source is your most-wanted feature? That hardware isn't open.
Gpt-3 wouldn't make the errors that the author of this article made.
Set up ranked ballot voting and geographically reasonable ridings then if things go sideways the populace has no one to blame but themselves.
That’s not how it works. This is a good primer by the Bank of England: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

Bank lending always creates new money. They don’t (and can’t) “lend deposits”.