skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That’s fine if you don’t.

I don’t have any money in SVB nor anyone I know.

However, I have a vested interest to lower the risk of a contagion.

I think the ROI to the US economy should make sense for a bailout.

It sucks. And I’m once again paying with my tax dollars. But a deposit bailout, while shaving a few percentage off seems to make sense.
Under what regulatory framework?
> Extra money is precisely what Yellen is proposing.

That's certainly not what any of the articles quoting her are saying.
> No 10 person company is going to split their 2.5 mil 10 ways to get insurance.

This is a service banks provide transparently. Not sure how much paperwork is required, probably could be optimized to a couple of clicks.
> …while the real criminals here are the Silicon Valley CEOs who conspired to start a bank run…

Yeah, way to victim blame.

Only an irrational person would “take one for the team” and leave their assets in an obviously failing bank.

I mean, if only so-and-so had kept their mouth shut nobody would have noticed that some cryptodudes and dudettes had blown a few measly billion of their customers’ funds.
Right, the dash length seems more of an aesthetic choice, like a drop cap or something.
Put the money in a money market fund backed by T-bills. Zero credit risk and easy access to cash.

> Was there any level of due diligence that could have warned people off of SVB?

Really no. A small business manager doesn't have time or expertise to read a bank's financial statements. SVB's did show serious problems but most businesses don't have the capacity to spot this.

But the answer to that is to not trust any bank for any long period when zero-risk options are available.
Thanks for sharing. Your audio work sounds really interesting! Is any of it sharable, or still in-flight?
> Adam was just very good at playing the VC game.

And he is still playing that game! If in five years we all discover he turned this into a giant nepotistic money-losing dumpster fire and left his VC firm holding the bag while he got a cool $1B exit package, no one has a right to be mad.
I think the population has to be starving first.
If the Feds make the depositors whole - it's a bailout.
Yeah I think the capitalist version of that is more regulation to the point where large banks aren’t able to take on so much risk to depositors.
> > I just don’t understand why folks on the internet are so passionate about the depositors being hit by this

Well if you want to go down to the nitty gritty of it, depositors are competitors for stuff, especially in San Jose and San Francisco where every square inch of stuff (any stuff) is super-expensive.

The ones complaining and taking time to argue against any involvement of govt. in SVB are people and institutions who didn't hold any funds in SVB but think or have reason to think that their competitors do
Some people flag because they think that asking for a bailout is ridiculous. Other people flag because they want to hide the shame.
In many cases the loans are to depositors (and the debt is questionable). The just thing would be make depositors without debt with svb whole first, ofc there is no system of fairness in finance.
I think there’s a shocking lack of political literacy at work here because any action that could be perceived as a bailout by a layperson will be an albatross around the neck of any politician that supports such measures. Several of the VCs who spent Q4 of last year gloating about layoffs are now saying the sky is falling - so they aren’t exactly a sympathetic group. You can belly-ache about populism or whatever but that’s why you’re seeing tepid responses from Washington.

For the record I hope SVB gets taken over and depositors are made whole quickly but I think as an industry we are overestimating our political capital.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118130
A bailout is within the law if that’s what they want to do.

It’s just a matter of whether you think the ROI is worth it.
This is not a typical liquidity squeeze. The scenario you are talking about is where liquidating some assets all at once would crash the market and so to capture the value a sale needs to be made over time.

The treasury and agency mbs markets are plenty deep enough to handle this liquidation. The issue is that the value of the holdings have dropped. That’s a solvency issue.
Anna Cramling videos are what will help you.
Well put, can pull the "capitalism" at the expense of few to many yet "socialist" when conductive for mostly a few, but not many times.

I still think they will get away with bailing out several banks that will otherwise fall hence the system. Via means that adhere to whatever rules were put in place.
This is similar to how it's typeset in TeX as well: two for en, three for em.
>then distribute the rest pro rata based upon closing balance from when the fed's took over.

The second part of that sentence addresses your question.
It's likely SVB has assets in excess of $250k per account. So if they are sold, I'd expect depositors to get at least $250k and possibly more, depending on how those assets are sold.

It only becomes a bailout if the government pays beyond the sale of svb's assets.
No bail out! It's your own fault for! You shouldn't have taken such insane risks! You deserve to lose your money, that's capitalism in action! We shouldn't socialize your losses!
I've never heard that perspective before about raising the voice, but I really like it.

What's even more interesting to me is that this contrasts with a parenthetical which I now realize lowers the voice when we read it aloud.

Did you discover that difference on your own or did you read it somewhere? Just curious.
An INDIVIDUAL payoff. Not the global one. By your argument, nothing stops the nuclear powers from destroying themselves. Yet somehow in the 60s the nuclear powers figured out the mutually assured destruction is also a prisoner’s dilemma and they COOPERATE despite the individual payoff being greater.
Yep, and he also almost got wiped out in 2008 even though he was "right".
The system of roads that carries goods from point A to point B is not 'free', it's taxpayer-financed. Governments could also use tax revenue to pay for nationwide fiber-optic systems that carry information from point A to point B.

Note 'paying for' doesn't mean hiring private contractors to run the system, it means having government employees run the systems while relying on the competitive private sector for things like manufacturing fiber optic cable (comparable to the road system, where equipment like road graders is privately manufactured).

If congestion becomes a problem, as with roads, alternatives like trains for public transit to reduce traffic loads are also plausible. Regardless, those who claim there is a competitive free market solution to the issue of basic infrastucture are either highly ignorant or just pushing for private monopoly control with high rents.
The C-suite paid themselves millions of dollars via bonuses and stock sales right before insolvency. Executives got paid. What’s to stop future bankers from running the same playbook? (We can debate that this the stock sale was premeditated/signaled months in advance, but the stock had already declined 80% from its 2021 peak and they surely knew about the tough liquidity position months ago — external observers drew attention to this back in January).

Note, one of the SVB executives was the former Lehman Brothers CFO in 2007, just one year prior to that institution’s collapse in 2008. What did he learn, exactly, besides how to get out in time?

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/silicon-valley-bank-exec...
Since it was the result of single moment in time 100 years ago and never adjusted, yes it was basically an accident of history.
I agree with you. I listened to the usually fantastic All In Podcast yesterday. Usually, I find the content very interesting but yesterday I felt like all four of them were all about protecting their little world.

To me, it sounds like SVB cut a lot of corners and SV customers enjoyed advantages of some of these cut corners.

I am deeply sympathetic to people who may not get paid for a while, or have their startups go under. That said, there are precise laws covering what the FDIC can and can not do. I think the general public is tired of very connected people and companies getting special treatment.

There is certainly a danger of contagion, of regional banks taking a hit, by being compared to SVB, but that does not change my opinion, and I certainly will not stop doing business with two relatively small Credit Unions in my state.
Except this is the opposite of what happened in 2008 with bailing out the banks. Then, the banks got public money to remain solvent. Here, the bank is taking the hit and the government is ensuring the depositors get their funds back. In 08 people were kicked out of their homes and banks were propped up with public funds. Here, the depositors are being made whole and the bank is going out of business. The salt is your typical 0 knowledge hot take.

It’s absolutely in the interest of the greater economy to have a functioning banking system backing high risk/high reward activities like Silicon Valley. And charge the risk appropriately high fees, of course. SV has been a very bright spot in the economy for several decades now - through thick and thin.

If anything, it’s a lesson about how assets should be accounted for in corporate statements. It’s also a statement that the perception of SV is a little sour and could use some reflection. Maybe look for ways to better engage the rest of the community and figure out where resentment stems. (I’d guess calling large swaths of the US “fly over country”, charging high prices, and other consumer feedback involved.)
Magically using billions of federal money to hold assets to maturity is a bailout. If hypothetical JPMorgan is willing to pay for the (ie) bonds $20B, but they "support" $25B of deposits... that $5B is a bailout. Even if in 10 years those bonds would be worth $25B.
Who, if not the government with a printing press, can insure nearly all the money in the banking system? Where does it come from?
Amusingly Thiel himself seems to have been out of SVB. He's being fingered[1] as the "cause" of the bank run and lots of people are asking if he shorted the stock.

[1] Somewhat unfairly. I mean, the guy's an outrageous jerk, but from the evidence at hand it genuinely looks like he recognized the problem with their balance sheet before everyone else, got himself out, and told his companies to do the same. And he was right. That's not fraud, that's good faith financial analysis.
Yes, it's interesting.

This has been known and ocassionally touted for AGES. I've attempted to start a couple of such projects and have been following the progress of other projects with similar ideas.

There has been near ZERO interest for them, because there's no currently viable business case for such projects, except "let the government pay for it." Data mining isn't THAT useful if there's no data in there - who would force entities like companies, universities or the SEC to push the data into the blockchain?

I'd be very happy if could find funding for https://github.com/WOTvision/wot1 and I can see a business case for it as a potential platform for legal, paid distribution of news between creators/reporters and distributors like news portals. But even so, no takers.
It is completely insane to allow innocent depositors to lose their money especially when the government clearly would have no problem coming up with the funds to backstop depositors since this is an isolated incident. This bank being located in a tech hotspot is incidental and I am sure some non-techies are swept up in this as well. Imagine a 70 year old woman who just lost her husband and sold her house to downsize to an apartment. She has $1 million in her SVB account and plans to live off the interest in her retirement. Should this 70 year old widow take a $750k haircut because she hasn’t spent the last few years brushing up on SVB 10-k filings and calling up SVB’s board of directors to ask them how they plan to manage interest rate risk?

FDIC limit should be way higher anyway (when was the last time it was raised?) but if we allow depositors to lose money it will quickly cause a stampede to the handful of huge banks and drive smaller regional banks out of business. That’s why other bank stocks are also plummeting right now. Is that what you want?

If an enormous earthquake strikes one region causing billions of dollars of damage but you live on the other side of the country do you complain about the federal government spending your tax dollars to help those people rebuild?

For the record I believe SVB shareholders and debt holders will get wiped out, as they should.
Can and unfortunately...do.
getting an infinite spinner
They have more than $250K per client but not the full value.

Each account should be allocated MIN(balance, 250K). Then the remaining should be allocated pro rata. So if one is still owed $1000 (ie the balance was $251K before the collapse), then that account’s share of the remainder is: $1000 / (sum of all remaining balances owed)

The haircut per account is only on amounts beyond $250K.
Rather not, these were an absurd caprice. CARS and YACHTS. All these luxurious, collector special edition, designer cars and yachts.
to be fair, the $350 million a16z put in is secured by the 4,000 multi family apartment buildings he owns. i.e. he transferred the deeds from his own company to this joint thing owned by him and a16z in order to get the 350.
There's a brand (can't remember the name) that sells for a similar price on Amazon Germany. I can't stand them. Switched to feather hi (more expensive, yet still cheap compared to multi blade razors) and am happy now.
> "And, now, teachers face censorship in multiple states for teaching about race, gender, and sexual diversity."

Surely the United States is ahead of Singapore when measured in teachings on sexual diversity.
I get bailing out depositors. It's not like you have that many options with our current system. You have to keep your liquid assets somewhere, banks are the only option and they are going to do risky business with your assets. Maybe you should be more prudent when choosing your bank but it's not like you can avoid the risk or that depositing with SVB was caused by greed (at least I think not, correct me if I am wrong).

Long term solution is imo obvious as well: decouple deposits and lending business. You should pay for having your money in a bank and being able to conveniently operate it. The bank should not do any businesses with the money (maybe something like buying government T-bills should be permitted) and profit purely from providing services: safety, transfers, payments.

Loan making should be a separate industry. Gather capital, fulfill regulation and do business as it is today but not with deposits but with stakeholders capital.

In such a setup there is little systemic risk: bank goes bust? Shareholders lose the money. No moral hazard of "I will deposit in this risky bank and the government bails me out if things go sour".

Want to keep liquid assets conveniently? Pay for it. Want to invest in a loan making operation? Buy shares in a bank and accept the risk.

The current system forces depositors to accept risks of loan making business just because they need a place to keep liquid assets. It's not like they were asked a question: "hey, do you want us to risk your money or do you prefer to pay for operational costs of your account but we keep the money safe?". If the question was asked then it would be very easy to say no to any kind of bailout.
Yes, but "worth" is a complicated concept here. What's probably going to happen is that a big bank like JPMorgan is going to buy the remaining assets at 100% book value, and the depositors are going to be made whole out of that. That's not their current market value if sold at fire-sale prices, but banks have the time horizons to hold those assets to maturity and not worry so much about their market value. The stability of the US banking infrastructure is worth more to JPMorgan then haggling over a few billion dollars of lower rates bonds
But why? What purpose does that serve? It's hardly even inflationary, the value was basically destroyed, so the Fed conjuring replacement money doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Shareholders will still be taking a major loss, and they are the ones who ought to be held responsible, so it makes sense. You can't fault depositors for not doing thorough diligence on a 40-year-old bank with a good reputation and it doesn't make sense to punish their employees for it, especially in a cooling job market with uncomfortably high inflation.
You've made no reply to the many comments pointing out the many ways to safely manage cash.

Why aren't these companies, and the VCs advising them, responsible for neglecting Cash Management 101?
This is like, the secret to life. If you can enjoy exercise, healthy eating, working on your relationship, and challenging impactful work, spiritual inquiry, etc. you are set
Their goal isn’t to see a run on SVB. But to save their investments they all told their startups to pull their money which cause svb to collapse. Now they want the rest of their money safe which is why they want a bailout.
Would that actually be case if a dozen banks failed in single day or a hundred? Does FDIC have enough man power to handle all of these banks at one time simultaneously?
Try earmuffs + earplugs.
I’m with you that we shouldn’t make a habit of spending taxpayer dollars to make depositors whole. We should have better regulation so this couldn’t have happened in the first place. Banks should be required to manage their risk better.

But in this particular instance taxpayers should want to invest in trust in US banks and dollars until regulation is corrected.
PLD Space keeps building Miura 1. The first Spanish private rocket
Not for me, personally.

This wasn't an article or blog post talking about the out-of-touch CEO-bros having the lack of self-awareness to even attempt to have us bail them out.

This was a direct link to their 'petition'.

We've gone beyond moral hazard, we are now at the point where it's expected for tax-payers and poor people to bail out the rich when their greed finally catches up with them.
There was a very noticeable uptick in spam (and also false positives like news Russia wouldn't like suddenly being marked as nsfw) starting after Elon laid off everyone he could. So i guess the human half of moderation disappeared.
well that's not fair, that's like a company trying to build a settlement on the moon and complaining they are making all their workers build the necessary steps to get there on earth!
no. absolutely not. these are smart greedy people playing the game for their own benefit. they knew the rules. if they lose they eat the losses just like anyone else.

it is all the bailouts and insider dealing that kill confidence in the dollar and the banking system. enforcing the rules increases confidence.
Depositing money in a bank is not supposed to be an investment with associated risk.

Yes there may be an interest yield and services rendered, but these customers were not greedily looking for a sizable return.
Adam AND his wife are both unethical people bordering on fraud. I wouldn't buy or believe anything he says. He has still not taken responsibility for We Work, his part in its decline, and what appeared to be massive financial impropriety. Adam is a C-suite grifter, plain and simple.
We literally have Dodd-Frank rules built up over the last 15 years to prevent these things from becoming a systemic failure.

I get that people are still squeamish about 2008. But our banking system is quite different today compared to back then. We built up these rules so that we wouldn't have to bailout banks in these situations anymore. That's what the entire damn point was.

If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. But I for one am more than willing to test out these rules... at least for the next few weeks... to see if they actually work. If they don't work, then we strengthen our regulations over the next 10 years. If they do work, then... success.

--------

We absolutely shouldn't just hit the bailout button before understanding this problem. 2008 + Dodd Frank was supposed to prevent this from being a systemic cataclysm.

-----------

What probably needs to happen is for Thursday's bank run to be undone. Issue a clawback so that the $46 Billion that escaped on Thursday and punish those who bankrun / collapsed the bank in a panicky stampede.

That's far, far more fair than a bailout. Redistribute the money in a more fair way, but accept the risk that SIVB made for itself and its community.
i can open a bank account in 2 minutes on my phone

it certainly isn’t alone an excuse if you are wealthy enough to even worry about the limit.

most wealthy people probably have dozens of accounts for this reason alone. I read an article just yesterday about how Giannis (NBA star) opened 50 bank accounts to put $250k each years ago.
Not my downvote. Corrective upvote actually.

>the internet costs money to keep running.

In the 1990's what you paid to your ISP every month covered it, and included enough web space for everyone to have an average site of their own, which the ISP would serve to the world for you.

Google had no ads because their motto was "Don't Be Evil".
Yes, in my experience (US and Canada), if paydays are the 1st and 15th, or every second Thursday, or whatever, then the money appears on precisely that day (adjusting for holidays, weekends, etc. by paying sooner).
I just took a look at Gunicorn and, while I'm probably a bit biased as a PHP developer who also maintains the infrastructure, I think setting up PHP is almost exactly the same as setting up Gunicorn.

The Nginx config will look a little different, but it requires roughly the same number of lines in the config file. In both cases a first-time user will probably be doing a Google search for a tutorial and following that tutorial, and in both cases it's pretty much as simple as copy/pasting in the installation commands and then copy/pasting the Nginx config and modifying it to suit your use case.

PHP has the advantage of allowing you to use shared hosting if you really want to, which is great if you're just getting started. Definitely not what I'd want to use for anything resource-intensive, but at least there's a way to build a basic site without setting up the server yourself.
Most Popular Programming Languages 1965 – 2022 (Visiualization)
Yields yeah
Yes in the world of Finance, but the word has a different meaning, in the mind of said Depositors...The word is used by Government and Banks, as a misdirection into a false sense of security.
Washing people and clothes, and cooking, produce a lot of vapour which if not vented will produce mould. You will rapidly find that the health issues produced by mould are a more serious issue than location, which is why this is not left to the market.
I don't know if there is any regulatory authority to do this, but I think those executives should have their bonuses clawed back to pay depositors.
> Apartments, obviously, need operable windows to vent cooking fumes and brighten living space

I assume this must be some building code law, otherwise there's a lot of room to get creative with active ventilation. If assumptions were challenged, there's a lot more possibilities for how to convert these spaces. A lot of people would be willing to rent a windowless space with a shared bathroom (e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/90740511/heres-what-its-like-liv...) if it meant they could live in a great location. Example: What if windowless apartments had a built-in 12" video wall like the one this YouTuber inexpensively DIY'ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv88wM6AN6Y
Can't the federal government simply take the long term t-bills directly and "close" them now at theoretical face value + interest.