skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I know about FDIC. I understand the rules. My bank has a great explainer on their website about the coverage. I don't know anything about NCUA and I don't care to learn,

The rules are pretty much the same. A credit union is likely to have the same kind of explainer that tells you the same stuff, except there's magic words like 'share account' instead of 'savings account' and 'member' instead of 'account holder'. And credit unions have to have some 'affinity' requirement. Most credit unions these days just have a geographic requirement (live, work, or worship in a list of counties), but some require a connection to some company or organization, but for otherwise national credit unions, there's often a 'loophole' way to get affiliated; you can often make a trivial one-time donation to become a member of an affiliate supporting organization and then get into the credit union. There's a little bit of smoke and mirrors there, to support the creative fiction that credit unions aren't just banks, but they pretty much are. Just like banks, some are good and some are bad, some will fail in the near future, some won't, and deposits under the $250k threshold are explicitly insured. Updates to rules that affect banks usually lead to updates that affect credit unions, but it sometimes takes a little while longer.

You'll also get notices about board of supervisors elections, which you won't for a bank with stockholders, but might get for a mutual bank.
That's bizarre and perverse! Surely someone has brought it up as a bug before that stdin is read-write! Is there some Posix standard preventing the standard shells from opening stdin as read-only???
It takes a lot of talent, hard work, and luck to be a successful bank CEO if you play by the rules. The invest imprudently while the sun is shining is a much easier strategy to pull off.
tl;dr coin toss: heads SVB wins, tails you lose
> I don't really want to find out

Why use this sort of language?

> What I said was true, it isn't FDIC insured.

But it is a banal truth, because they are simply insured by a different agency.

> I don't know anything about NCUA and I don't care to learn

So you were motivated by apathy and content in ignorance, rather than trying to scare people, with your language. Still a bad choice because it shows that you're not seriously trying to engage in a discussion and learn about a subject.
So I'm sure you have literally any example of when that worked, historically?

Spoiler: it has never worked. What you are thinking of are diplomatic, economic and military moves and counter-moves or negotiated settlements but the aggressor is always forced to compromise or delayed such that they lose their advantage.

Appeasement - the aggressor making demands and getting them with the idea that they will be then be satisfied - has never worked.
you know what, fair
I have a magnet that says "Clean" facing up, and "Dirty" upside down that I bought for $1 in 1998. When the dishes are emptied, or when someone starts the dishwasher, we spin the magnet so that the appropriate side is readable.

In hindsight, it is probably the most productive single dollar I've ever spent.
It's the customers of the bank that are benefiting from the government action, not the bank. The bank has now ceased to exist.

If you want to rant against the customers of a bad bank getting bailed out, that's fine, but the bank wasn't bailed out, it was wiped out. The new bank is the owner of the old banks assets and responsible for the old banks debts. The owners of the old bank have nothing to do with the operations of the new bank.
First Republic Bank Access to Liquidity from the Fed and JPMorgan Chase and Co
strengthening and diversification of our liquidity position.
The fact that thier motivations were convoluted should not make the tax payer any more on the hook for the consequences.

A disgraceful bailout, if entirely unsurprising.

Shades of "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".
There is no evidence of a “bailout” here or anywhere else in public. Post it when you have it.
"Another bank is getting a bailout"

No they are not. The shareholders and bond holders are getting wiped out. It is only the depositors that are being made whole. This is not like 2008 where they loaned cheap money to banks to keep them afloat but allowed the owners to remain.
So how would letting depositors get wiped out stop these executives and shareholders from repeating SVB?

Better to just ban such executives from the banking industry and set up better monitoring of banks to catch those that are trying to pull a SVB.
If you didn't load the dishwasher it can be hard to say if the dishes are clean without being pretty thorough, which can take a few minutes. It would be nice to have instant certainty, I'm going to keep this in mind.
>"far worse than any inflation."

In 1923 the exchange rate has reached 1 trillion DM for 1USD. We all know how it had ended.
> BoA was never at risk of failing.

Yes, they were, that's why the systemic risk exception was invoked for them.

> but they didn't need TARP

They needed the systemic risk exception and their own specific, $20 billion capital injection and government loss protection bailout plan very similar to Citigroup's to be announced (the announcement itself stabilized things enough that they ended up not needing the bailout, which also happened with Wachovia’s before Citigroup.)
They're essentially non-profit banks, which is a significant difference.
It's JavaScript that makes The Web unusable (with _few_ exceptions). And application and we know better what you want mindsets.
TIL that an independent contractor with his own tools has no capital. LOL.
Credit unions are by design not meant to serve business customers (some do, but they're the exception for a reason). Further, Canadian credit unions (with the kinda sorta exception of Desjardins) are insignificant in size, which is why I didn't bother mentioning them in the first place.

Let me repeat: Canada lacks the equivalent of regional banks, and that's a problem for entrepreneurs looking for banking (let alone loans) for new ventures.
If they had wanted to avoid a contagion, they could have just given a 6-month 100% deposit backstop to all the other banks, and let SVB play out naturally. But then the VCs might have lost a little money.
Bold of you to assume that work will be available to you.
All of these companies could have sold their uninsured deposits at a discount, made payroll, and let their equity holders take the loss. This is what equity holders are supposed to do. Instead they went on an embarrassing twitter begging campaign and unfortunately succeeded. The whole "workers missing mortgage payments" or "destroying a generation of innovation" is an insane, buck-passing take.
That’s not consistent with the historical record.

https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/01/bank-failures-by-...
>As for student debt relief, there's a huge difference between someone depositing money in a regulated major bank and expecting that Federal regulators were doing their job and that their money would be safe,

I've made a couple posts about this already but I don't see how people don't see the optics of the situation look incredibly bad. First off student debt is a special kind of debt, you can't bankrupt it and this has led to several adverse affects, namely skyhigh tuition prices and zero due diligence. You can't say in one breath that CEOs of tech businesses are completely helpless to audit whether their bank is trustworthy, and in another say 18 year olds should have understood the risk they were getting into.

To you it's "disingenuous" but to everyone else it just looks like the haves play by a different system; rig the system against the have-nots, and then tell the have-nots they should been "more responsible".
I understood your question and the issue perfectly well.

It's widely known that Circle backs USDC 1:1 with cash and cash equivalents. That's the value prop compared to Tether.

It doesn't have to be a huge mystery as to whether Circle can meet Monday liquidity demands. You could look at USDC trading volume since it de-pegged, set the buy/sell ration as you see fit - or even do some onchain analysis - then compare to Circle's cash reserves. This would be a worst case scenario.

Logic trumps puzzles.
> heck most don’t understand how banks work

Even before this week I already knew I didn't understand how banks worked, or finance in general. Which is why I keep what little cash I have in an insured account.
Wall Street — not taxpayers — will pay for the SVB and Signature deposit relief plans

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/13/wall-street-not-taxpayers-wi...
It’s human nature. Just like corruption, you’ll never solve it only keep it at bay. Or political power grabs.

Same with cronyism. Actors have every incentive to bend rules to benefit them. The solution is to fight against it.
But wait, I see that SVB was paying 4.50% of interest per year to depositors (cf. https://www.svb.com/account/y-combinator )

Even if depositors lose 5%. 5% that they shouldn't have earned because of the ultra high-risk position taken, maybe it's from them it should be taken...
Lack of government action on housing destroyed the housing market much more than the fed.
In fact, in many cases, deposits in provincial Credit Unions in Canada (e.g. Alberta and BC) are 100% guaranteed. (As opposed to the big banks, which are only guaranteed to $100,000). Some provinces hve other rules, but in general, deposits to Canadian Credit Unions have better deposit insurance protection than the big Canadian Banks.

Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/... (and the marketing campaigns of the credit unions)
How is this not wealth destruction?

All shareholders just got reduced to either zero, no? Or at least they only can get something, with whatever remains after the assets are sold off.
Imagine this scenario:

You invest $1.

Other people deposit $50.

You take $51 to a Las Vegas roulette table and bet it all on black.

50-50 chance there's $102 afterwards and shareholders and employees get to share most of the $51 gain; 50-50 chance there's $0.

Taking outsized risks with other peoples' money is a great gig for both stockholders and executives. We normally prohibit financial services firm from engaging in this kind of behavior, because the economic incentives favor outsized risk.
It's 0 % shocking to see the lack of empathy and schadenfreude, if you've been in H1B related discussion on this site over the years.
Never, the funds are just what's left over after business operations, the entire purpose of which is to conservatively reinvest back to help grow the business and build a buffer to withstand future economic downturns.
Its possible. Its called sovereign money. You basically have an account with the central bank just like private banks do (but they dont want anybody else to have)

These accounts pay strictly zero but can never default.

Anybody who wants to get a return can deposit with a private bank but then they need to monitor that bank because if it mismanages risk they are on the hook.

The thing to understand is that private banks are experts at risk free profiteering and passing the buck, not at managing risks which is really hard work

The monetary system is an absurd and unfair anachronism and it lurches from disaster to disaster.
battery lasts weeks! Now that's something I want to see on my phone...
Who scrutinizes the banks they make business with? To me, that is exactly the role of the regulators. Make sure the banking system is sound, and if you get the license to run a bank, you do it under certain rules that will protect depositor's money. I don't see how depositors should be held responsible in this case. And worst of all, you are actually punishing depositors who trusted the bank and the banking system, versus the ones that caused the run. Which in my view are also not to judge, since they were only protecting their assets.
> the moral hazard

The moral hazard in this case is that depositors will feel safer putting all their deposits into a single high-risk bank where they can earn higher interest on deposits, since the implicit insurance is effectively much higher than $250k per individual or company. I think the sensible to solution to this, in the modern age of banking, is for the Federal Reserve to not allow concentrated, high risk banks to exist in the first place. In the same way that the government doesn't allow carnival operators to reduce safety standards in order to make roller coaster rides cheaper or unreasonably fast.
So by your own words, it’s still a bailout being paid by taxpayers.

It’s just that taxpayers may decide to pay in either money (fees, less interest) or time (switching banks and updating payment methods, or taking money out to buy bonds).
> They were completely foreseen

Sure which is why their stock crashed 60% in 1 day and their entire 40 years existence wiped out within the week.
> Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.

I think everyone knew that already. Since 2008 at least.

It's very possible that if this is not done, the only banks left at the end of the week will be the "too big to fail" ones. A domino effect is very hard to prevent when it's based entirely on consumer confidence and those consumers can very easily create a bank run on literally anything if they freak out.
I tried installing this. I should have read the code or it should have been explicitly mentioned in the README that this would install more than 2GB worth of packages. Maybe that is trivial and understood, but I wasn't aware and I believe there would be quite a lot of people like me.

Memory is usually not an issue, but for my server it is.
-> running a board game group at lunch at work

I mean would you say the same of S.B.F of FTX who was playing league of legends while on the clock?

If everything were running smoothly there would be no reason to look. But if mistakes are getting made while on the job, could it be because an individual is doing more than the job description?
The problem was that central planners reduced rates to near zero in the face of adversity, instead of using fiscal policy more aggressively as you suggest - except instead of taxing negative externalities, they should have subsidized positive externalities so relying less on rates. Now we need to get rates back to a sensible place (roughly 5%) so that risk/time is correctly priced and we don't have exorbitant asset bubbles.
Bailing out the depositors is bailing out the VCs who own the depositors.
The alternative is the rich forever get bailouts.
No. The banks are charged for that insurance. They provide the funds. There is no bailout. Using the equity buffer for coverage is _the whole point_.
Actually, if it was Realpolitik then the US would engage in a off-shore balancing approach. Not giving unending support to the Saudi-Israel alliance. In fact, the US would gain strategic power by stopping to be so anti Iran. In a more neutral position both nations have far more to lose.

And the Saudis are rightfully panicked about this ever happening and Israel-Saudi alliance spend absurd amount of money in Washington, including think-tanks, employing generals, paying politicians, producing fake intelligence, grand standing and many other methods to make sure not even a slight change in position towards Iran is ever allowed.

As the US, literally putting yourself in the position where you have no other choice then being somebodies little toothless bitch isn't actually good realpolitk. Letting Saudi money so directly influence US politics is idiotically dumb in fact.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons.
> You concluded that the article didn't need to be written

That's my opinion, but we can legitimately disagree about that. I have no wish to argue it.

My argument with you was with your interpretation of the article:

> The message I took from the writing wasn’t “like everything indiscriminately”, but closer to “stop making hating stuff a part of your identity”.

You may have taken that message from the article, but you apparently already had that idea before you read the article. As far as I see, there's nothing in the article text that says anything like that.

In any case, my original comment wasn't arguing with you but rather with someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35122226 You replied to me, but I don't think your reply was very relevant to mine.
:shrugging:

Okay, then.
Actually, this particular bank was tied up in "the means of production". A disruption could lead to increased inflation, not a decrease, because after the businesses fired their employees there would be fewer goods chased by dollars.

Instead, one must destroy value the right way to achieve lower inflation. A surprise insolvency that wipes deposits that never were really considered investments at risk... nah ... not a good destruction of wealth. But take heart, stockholders were zeroed and bondholders maybe not far behind.
I miss Windows 7. I will even settle for 10 now...

In my humble opinion, Windows 7 was "peak windows".

While I keep tiny Windows partitions on my machines, I very rarely boot them - mainly just to run Windows Updates. If I must use Windows, I have a Windows 7 guest running in VirtualBox that lets me continue on with my normal Linux day at the same time.
I've put my life savings in chickens. It has paid off fabulously this year.
Sunk cost fallacy would be taking and failing 3 years of college courses and deciding to continue because, "Well, I'm already three years and $30k (or more) in." Being one class or semester shy and making a decision to finish, if it gives a major payoff (starting salaries often jump substantially, some career paths are totally closed without the degree, etc.), is perfectly rational.
Nearly every hyperinflation example (there are very few, in fact) has something additional to that stuff.

In the case of Weimar Germany, there was the little matter of THE VERSAILLES TREATY that required them to endlessly pay war reparations and punitive payments in gold. Britain told France to cut it out, but France was mad enough at the Germans that they continued. This led to the rise of the Nazis and WW2.

https://www.history.com/news/treaty-of-versailles-world-war-...

You should read more economic viewpoints, such as Walter Mosler on hyperinflations:

https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Weima...

Oh, and meanwhile there was a "free money miracle" going on in nearby Austria, and clearly did not lead to hyperinflation, quite the opposite: everyone paid off their taxes due to the demurrage of the free money... keep in mind this was while all around them there was a growing depression... even Mises institute grudgingly agrees!

https://mises.org/library/free-money-miracle
No, not like margarine at all.

I mean biotech technologies that are essentially artificial milk glands, producing something very close to 'real' milk, without cows.

Why grow a whole cow when we just want what the milk glands secrete, why grow a whole tree when we just want orange juice? Etc.
Just call them oligarchs and have done with the whole argument.

Wait, what happened to the robber barons? I guess they didn't have PACs.
Nothing can be done about the trash fire when everyone else actually likes the trash fire. One person can't change the world (not when everyone else is opposed to him).

Sure, you can blame the 3-ton SUV proliferation on the car-centric society Americans have created for themselves, but that isn't going to change anytime soon, unless Americans are forced to change it somehow. Sure, a lot of Americans complain about it, some of them even try to do something about it, but it isn't enough, because most other Americans actually like it that way and work against their efforts. Even the ones who complain mostly don't understand that it's a product of their own choices and how much they're contributing to the problem personally.
Not just the VCs though and therein lies the rub. You'd have to start differentiating between various kinds of account holders and that doesn't really work beyond the 'private individual/business' classification.
Kinda. As someone who banked at SVB, I would not willing put myself, my CFO, and my director of operations through this Friday + weekend again if you handed me a million bucks. We didn't lose money but we're going to have a lot of inconvenience and we had a lot - a lot - of stress and uncertainty and spent a lot of time making contingency plans. A very high cost for a 15 person startup.
False. Check the linked press release in my parent comment - the BTFP is available to all banks and allows them to use their under par assets as collateral for loans at par from the Federal Reserve.

“
Borrower Eligibility: Any U.S. federally insured depository institution (including a bank, savings association, or credit union) or U.S. branch or agency of a foreign bank that is eligible for primary credit (see 12 CFR 201.4(a)) is eligible to borrow under the Program.
“
Is "international market" like "cosmopolitan Rothschild bankers"?

_We're_ the financial and IP rights imperialists! If anyone's buying any countries on international markets it's us.
> I don't have a distorted view.

Maybe you lived in a bubble in Europe
They didn't properly hedge the bonds or they didn't anticipate the much spoken rate hikes. That's the irresponsible part. If that's as easy as buying treasury bonds then everyone can be a fund manager.
Making student loans bankruptable has less to do with protecting students and more to do with 1.) reigning in tuition costs and 2.) forcing lenders to consider risk.

The fact that an 18 year old can get any amount of money, no questions asked, means that institutions have all the incentive to charge whatever they want - their customers will pay almost any price.
A "money market" account means the money is invested in extremely short term government or corporate bonds. SVB probably wasn't paying that 4.5%, they were just passing through what the market is paying for money market funds right now.
I'd much rather pay more for a home than to have my bank account magically go up in smoke for no reason of my own.
Is it possible that the root issue here is that you are not well suited to large companies? The dynamic at big cos is radically, shockingly different from that at a smaller co (<1000 ppl, say). You wouldn't be the first person to be horrified by how big cos work and exhibit symptoms of burnout. Yes, your post reeks of burnout.

Some people love big companies. Some people hate it. There's no shame in either position.
Cronyism is something that will always happen when free markets mix with democracy. In the USA, this started before the end of the first Presidential term. It isn’t new.

All governments suck, all economic systems suck, and it all sucks because people are flawed. We can always try for better, but so far every system that humans design, humans also corrupt and destroy.

I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.
Yes I believe the parent was making a joke :)
The first cool hack I ever saw was on the MTS system in Ann Arbor. Students would program a login screen and leave their VT100 or Tektronix terminal. The next student would think it was the real login and provide their password. Then the hackers would move their account balance to their own account.
The FDIC will probably just hold them to maturity and go running to congress if they need more liquidity at any time.
Cronyism is the end stage of everything. All political and economic systems ultimate tend towards dominance by a minority who refuse to lose, and warp the system to suit their interests until they are removed by one means or another. It's a concept so old it even as a word for it: Anacyclosis.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#Polybius
It would be a mistake to for them to underestimate how much anger there is going to be over this. Particularly given the whole socialism for me but not for thee feel the whole episode has.
That's answered I think.