skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's only Thursday's run that tipped SVB into insolvency.

What triggers in their holdings do you think started the run?
Just to be on the safe side. (ai don't have $$ in that bank so just saying)

The point is, the fact that someone is spreading rumors on Social media already half confirmed that someone out there is going to attack this bank. It could very well be a geniune group of depositors who wanted to get $$ out, or it could be paid by someone to pose like that. Either way, individuals have to protect their own best interest.
Running to the Fed for help as soon as shit got real; made a lot of the bootstrapping libertarian ethos stereotypically espoused by a certain of VC seem very hollow.
Already proven not to work.

" I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms ... "

"Greenspan: I was wrong about the economy" - https://youtu.be/XQFq97ljy3k
I heard a legend at RPI that some students figured out just how big of a job they'd need to submit to underflow the MTS money variable and give themselves a balance of 2^24 or whatever size value it was actually using. IIRC, it was a line plotter job that would have (had they not cancelled it before actually printing and making the operators very sad, which is something you don't want to do) printed a solid black square the entire size of the paper.
Not sure why I got down-voted, but what I said just happened - https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1337. The depositors will be made whole.
Problem is maybe those sending their kids to meat packing factory read 1 book every 2 decade…
Why are people so freaking obsessed with passing responsibility onto depositors. It’s perfectly reasonable for the government to be responsible for protecting money as property, just like we do with every other property. Unlike a house which needs maintenance, money is a virtual good. There’s nothing I should have to do to maintain my claim on my bank account.
So if i understand this correctly you can get a 0% interest loan as a bank if you need liquidity? I wish I could put my assets up for a 0% loan…
We distinguish intent all the time for various legal reasons, and if something done for the right reasons goes wrong, the empathy is certainly more readily available.

I have yet to see any real reason to suggest this was anything other than a blunder. A relatable one too, as nobody in 2021 thought the fed would have to hike interest rates at the rate they have since.
Congress Approves First Big Dodd-Frank Rollback (2018)
But if you’re building an interactive tool and choosing between a gui and a tui, you could just build a gui with a command palette.
Evidence that SVB paid higher interest than other banks? This doesn’t seem to be the root cause here. They had a huge volatility in deposit base.
In defense of Bitcoin, it would have taken a decade to process the $40 billion of withdrawals from SVB on the blockchain, so a bank run couldn't have happened.
This is awesome! I've wanted to try llama.cpp and you just reduced my to-do list significantly on my Sunday :) Thanks!
PPP loans and Silicon Valley VCs getting bailed out now railed against student debt relief

Contemporary debates are over *who* gets free money from the government. I’m sure this is going to end well.
Every business has the risk of an equity wipeout if it goes bankrupt. SVB was always going to have its equity zeroed, the only question was whether depositors were also going to lose out.
Consider: “Reserve requirements are a tool used by the central bank to increase or decrease the money supply in the economy and influence interest rates. Reserve requirements are currently set at ZERO as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
ref: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/requiredreserves.asp
> Does this statement reflect any shift in policy?

It’s a decision of how to apply existing policy to a specific situation, not a policy change. Existing policy is nonspecific enough that reasonable people could disagree on how best to apply it here without changing it.

> Haven’t depositors always been first on the list to get paid, even their uninsured deposits?

Yes.

> I don’t know if charging a special assessment to member banks is standard operating procedure

It isn’t routine, which is why it requires invoking the systemic risk exception.

> but that doesn’t sound like government intervention.

It’s a government decision to intervene in a particular way, so…

> It just sounds like reasonable operation of the FDIC.

It’s not just “reasonable operation of the FDIC”, since both Fed and Treasury actions are involved. And, even if it was, FDIC is a government corporation, so its actions are government intervention. Its reasonable operation is reasonable government intervention, but its still government intervention.
>And of course, the FDIC is not guaranteeing deposits of over $250k

FDIC says they are.

After receiving a recommendation from the boards of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, and consulting with the President, Secretary Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors. Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1337
>At the same time, this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.

No, there are systemic risk exceptions within the rules. If a bank is large enough, then the systemic risk to the economy as a whole is large enough to warrant this step. "Too big to fail" is typically a derisive comment, but it is not without practical reason. Governments are supposed to act in the best interest of the governed. I hope it is clear to all of us that avoiding the economic disruption of a cascade of bank failures is in our interest.

Smaller bank failures do not pose systemic risk and so they will not be backstopped in the same way. Might seem like unfair treatment, but practical concerns often outweigh the theoretical. By the way, SVB is still a failure and as a company is now gone. Some other entity will take over its assets, debts, and customer services. All senior management has been removed.

>I understand part of this is human nature but I really wish we could plan for these entirely foreseeable events ahead of time so that it's not just cases of "selective justice" with regards to who gets bailed out.

We did. That is why we have the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury department. They did their job and did it quickly and effectively. SVB did not get bailed out, the depositors did.
They aren't. The particular "bet" here, treasury bonds, are considered the safest form of US money, they are considered "risk-free".
Seatbelts and airbags are a leading cause of auto accident injuries. They need to go.

(I know you’re saying that tongue-in-cheek. I’m just being a stinker)
It does seem like a weird loophole and charade to have to split money among many banks. Just give businesses a way to store their money without earning interest and with no risk. As far as I know that’s not an option under our banking system
That and the Federal Reserve is offering extra capital to other banks to help them weather the runs currently happening.
The farther away you move from the editing functionality, the more bugs start showing up.

I’ve fallen into something of a cycle of adding packages until I’m annoyed by things breaking which results in me cutting back down to the basics.

I’m always amazed, once I get back to bare emacs and mostly elpa packages: everything works so well.
Not quite sure how much to look into but the operating of the UK side seems flawed. One Director left in Jan, and the particular Director has previously had 35 businesses all of which were lending companies and paid significant dividends. There seems to be a trend. I dont think this is poor risk management, I think this was very intentional.
Instead they learned that donating to the democratic party is a good insurance policy.
This is nitpicking. While that paper is a good read and important to understand how banking works, the parent commenter's point about how money creation works, and how a narrow bank would not participate in it, is valid. Deposits _are_ a source of funding that a bank considers when making loans, even if a bank does not "turn deposits into loans."
> You do not have a right to a job at the taxpayers expense.

Ignoring the fact that millions of Americans literally have this, the taxpayers are on the hook for zero percent of the depositor restorations in SVB.
I'd like to see them personally financially wiped out, but that's not how this process works.

I suppose it's possible there could be a shareholder suit against them. That would be interesting.
This is not a story of class struggle. This is about a government driving confidence in property rights.
that seems like a bit of a silly argument. By that token any time we fine a bank we're not fining the bank, but the bank's customers?
Well, wealthy people weren't dumping their money into these banks above the 250k FDIC limit for no reason.
This was a rare event when, for once, elites would learn that it's possible to do everything right and still fail catastrophically due to systemic factors. This has been the case for the majority of people over the past decade. The only reason regular people accepted their own situation over the past decade is that they thought "rules are rules." But no, rules are not rules, it turns out. Only plebs need to take the consequences of silly or unjust rules. The elites are immune to unjust rules. When a pesky inconvenient rule affects the elites, it can simply be waived away.

Why did I have to learn my lesson about the flawed system and the acceptance of tough luck, but politically-connected people didn't?

What we have today is a 2-class society.

It's the word of law above all... Unless you're politically connected; then suddenly the word of law yields to common sense.
So there is SVB and Signature bank that have both collapsed in terms of $300 billion. If what you are saying is correct, does that mean that the banks are required to pay hire fees across the industry upwards of $300 amortized over a certain amount of years? If that's the case then the taxpayer will most definitely be on the hook. I don't know if spread across all taxpayers this fee would be negligible, and I also don't know how this would affect the CD rate that banks would offer to clients.

Presumably it would force them to lower it, which would be counter to the anti-inflationary moves of the Federal Reserve, but that might not matter given that this is a current issue. It's possible this might also affect banks willingness to raise rates in the future in response to Fed tightening if they thought there was a risk to the banking sector.

Given the size and how quickly the banks are failing I'd hazard a guess (this is not financial advice) that in order for the FDIC to maintain it's own portfolio it would have to raise rates enough to be noticeable to consumers, even given the number of FDIC accounts.

Can someone comment on if this is the case and how much this might affect forward guidance for banks and consumers?
Of course.

If JPM and Citi et al receive a large special assessment as a result of this, where do you think the money comes from?
We banked at SVB and got 0% interest, it was just the bank recommended for Startup’s to use.

It seems the risk was not choosing a top 3 bank since no one can survive a Bank Run and the largest banks are too big to fail. Which is terrible for competition if everyone’s essentially forced to use a top 3 bank just to have confidence for your money in a US Bank to be safe.
You seem to think that the world doesn't already work like this. There are tons [1] of [2] products [3] that are offered specifically to make it easy to spread cash around at multiple institutions. And that in and of it self is beneficial, because it is essentially diversifying the risk of those deposits. Now, with what the fed has done, why would anyone bother spreading their risk around?

1. https://www.intrafinetworkdeposits.com/

2. https://www.wintrust.com/maxsafe.html

3. https://www.moneycrashers.com/cash-management-account/
...why? For asking for government intervention to protect the innocent and avoid contagion? Why should that be embarrassing?
Save you a couple characters of typing

< mario.nes nc play-nes.org 4444
Well, apparently they are too big to fail, given that the FDIC is covering them. So they should've been subject to the extra capital requirements that too big to fail banks have.
All useful type systems are turning complete. The only people who don't realise are those that want to rewrite everything in rust.
I lost money on treasury bonds when interest rates increased, where's my bailout?
Talk to the people who have the problem you are solving (or the people making purchasing decisions for those people). Do they know about the existing solutions? Do they use any? Would they be willing to switch? Have they switched in the past?
> the FDIC expects to recover 99% of the money

Where do you see the 99%? My understanding is the bulk of their assets (long-term bonds) dropped 30% in value. If these bonds are sold on the market, they wont have 99% of the money.

Maybe the treasury is giving them the money back of the bond?
Why are you happy for the employees? They took a risk working for a company that was depositing more than what was covered by fdic.
The post by Gary Tan on here yesterday was actually shocking for me.
This submission is about a library for building TUIs, though- what I was getting at is that as developers, we can choose to instead build guis and we’ll get better results.

I do agree with you that many gui apps are poorly built and bloated.
But would still love to know, what the course of action in that case should be...
“Banks” are legal fictions, abstraction that serve as tools for shareholders, “Banks won’t pay, but…shareholders…will” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what banks are.
> Having your bank account randomly disappear isn't one of the risks that anyone should have to take.

Then you put your funds in less risky banks who did not lobby to get an exemption from the regulations that protect against precisely this kind of thing. Even, spread it around safer banks.

Putting all of one's money in a bank because they have better returns or other investment opportunities is business. Not something that someone can be safe at the public's expense.

The public, because the public will pay for this one way or the other - if this is paid from the insurance that insures all banks like how the statement says, then it will cause all the banks who pay into this insurance pool to reflect it on their customers with fees. So every single person with a bank account in the US will pay. Its still public money, but it doesnt come directly from the US govt.'s pocked, so its 'okay'.
But, crucially, the shareholders are wiped out. No CEO would be incentivized to repeat the SVB strategy if they stand to make no gains from it.
No it isn't. In the history of the FDIC, no depositor has ever lost money, regardless of balance. The whole point of the FDIC is to avoid contagion, and they nipped this in the bud, again.

Moral hazard is if they made the investors whole. They did not. Depositors are not investors.
Love the simplistic views of avg HNers
Exactly right, these were mostly just people wanting a place to pay vendors and payroll. Millions of dollars in 0% interest checking accounts.
Why the scare quote on “founders”? It makes your comment come across as motivated.
The CEO cashed out $3.6 million in stock two weeks ago.
Bailout can refer to depositors who could not get back 100% of their assets above the FDIC limit based solely on SVB assets getting made whole (what I was referring to) or to the shareholders getting made whole (which I took great pains to explain as a different situation I was not referring to). But fundamentally the term "bailout" could be used to refer to either and distinguishing those two states is valuable.
I'm arguing nothing, and am trying to better understand why people are continually claiming it was their "greed" that caused this failure, and not their incompetence.

They didn't seemingly pursue a strategy that would have resulted in their pay increasing meaningfully, in fact it seems like they pursued a strategy they believed was safe and cautious. It wasn't, but they did seem to think so.

But I don't have all of the facts and this is not my wheelhouse, so I'm asking questions for clarity. "I don't know" is a reasonable answer, but not one I find around here much.
>How can you expect startup companies to spread their deposits across multiple banks?

Buy one year CDs from many banks and T-bills.
Possibly, but Dodd-Frank wouldn't have prevented what happened at SVB.
Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for single-image super-resolution
> It's great at a personal level that "founders" and startup employees didn't have to do without. But it's important to remember that they no longer automatically deserve any credit for taking risks and doing something new.

Mm hmm. Yes, after all is said and done, the main take away from this is that startup employees and founders no longer deserve credit for taking risks and doing something new. Glad our priorities are straight here on hackernews.
Hehe, yeah. Poor people are stupid.
Think of it a different way.

Wells Fargo/BoA are "too big to fail" institutions in the United States.

They got significant back hand, handshake deals, from Washington institutions to not only stay afloat, but for hundreds of little issues.

In essence, the FDIC is a well crafted "redistribution," of all the under the table benefits Wells/BoA get from lobbying the Feds, to the smaller banks.

The US has a deep interest in keeping its smaller banks alive.

I can say, in Australia, the small business lending market is hugely overvalued due to monopolist price gouging by a handful of large institutions.

In Canada, I'm told the situation is similar. Costs to small business are immensely higher than the United States.

Banks similar to Silicon Valley Bank are essential because they undercut BoA, and prevent the "Canada" situation.

Unfortunately, SVB blew its top off. But the system itself is good.
That's just basic logic that anyone would follow to survive. VC's had nothing to do with SVB's bad money management.
The government can't generally arbitrarily seize an operating business. (Indeed, in the recent Johnson & Johnson court case we saw the opposite: they asked to undertake bankruptcy proceedings early because they're facing a large liability, the government said no, not until you're proven to be actually bankrupt)
> coz that's what runs on remote machines

Is that actually still an issue these days with Docker containers and what not? How often do you access a remote server via SSH where you share an account with your colleagues and cannot install another shell next to bash? (So that bash could still be the default but you could switch on the fly.)
I'm not a specialist, but maybe it's not fine tuned for writing code. I got that sort of answer with old models of gpt3 as well.
Socialism for VC but not for thee.
Can we distinguish "something is offensive" from "something is being mentioned"? What is the perceived offense you see here towards the Dalai Lama?
I had a similar thought.

It's equivalent to buying the bond that represents the debt you owe.

Larger debt ends up in negotiations over the amount owed. War debt after WW1 resulted in greatly reduced repayments based on the original lending.

If you are a default risk on debt that has weak collateral, you could probably come to some agreement that pays back some fraction of the principal.
> An alternative would be to have circuits that implement boolean logic and go directly from instructions bits to the internal control logic, but microcode also makes it easier to execute an instruction in multiple steps instead of being tied down to the constraint that each instruction must execute in exactly one cycle.

Microcode is effectively just a program. Can't you just write the same program in Verilog or whatever? I think the answer is "yes", but then you can't patch it afterwards, plus Verilog/etc didn't exist when microcode was invented.

Which I think is why microcode was invented – it was a big time-saver when circuit design was an entirely manual pen/paper process, and also it kept component counts down when the per-component cost was very high. Now we have HDLs, and transistor budgets in the hundreds of millions or billions, those reasons don't really apply any more.

But the need to patch post-shipment is even bigger than it used to be. As we put ever more complex features in silicon, the probability of bugs increases. With 3rd generation computers, you could always fix bugs by having a technician rewire some of the circuitry – more work than just replacing the microcode, but still feasible. It is completely infeasible to physically rewire the circuitry of a microprocessor, if you can't fix the problem in software (and microcode is ultimately a form of software), all you can do is manufacture a replacement then throw out the original.

> But for each processor implementation, the available connections and execution units are going to be different. Microcode allows you not to expose all those underlying details to the outside.

That's another reason which probably isn't as strong as it once was. In the 1960s, lots of software was written in assembler – having the same assembly language across the entire IBM S/360 line was a big win, since it made it easy to port software between machines, reuse skills, etc. Nowadays, very little code is still hand-written in assembler, almost all software is compiled from a high-level language – so if different machines have different ISAs, or (more commonly) a common ISA but with each machine implementing a different subset of it, and that forces you to recompile to move the code to a new machine – still somewhat of a burden, but far less than in the 1960s, or even 1980s.
> If there’s a shortfall they will charge the banks a little extra in their next insurance payment, but keep in mind we’re talking about at most a few billion dollars spread over every bank; they are unlikely to pass on a small cost like that, but even if they do pass on the cost to the taxpayer it will be something like $10 per person maximum.

Sounds like a bailout at the taxpayers' expense, just with extra steps. A bailout of a few billion dollars that banks are allowed to pass on to their customers is still a bailout.
It was sparked by Founders Fund telling everyone to get money out of SVB, which didn't have any crypto exposure. They're invested in another startup bank (Mercury) so I think prosecuting a few VCs would encourage the others.
wasn't it ultra low interest investments, but very long term? They should have known it wasn't going to stay like that after the crazy 2020 ride. :/
Lehman Brothers collapse, bailout negotiations and bankruptcy happened over a weekend. AIG also bailed out 24hrs later

https://www.brookings.edu/research/history-credits-lehman-br...
People like Jason Calcanis were screaming on Twitter like the world was going to collapse and that the contagion would take down regional banks hurting ordinary consumers.

All because he wanted the government to bail out his startups.
Doesn't seem to work on Gnome terminal Version 3.44.0
The rom loaded to the site UI in nc no problem, and I selected Sixel (option 1), but nothing is happening
And to really punish him, we shall strip him of his "Class A" shareholder status at San Francisco FED.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-11/svb-ceo-b...

But not before we let him cash in $3.6M in stock. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/03/10/svb-fin...

Let this be a lesson to all of you other banks.