What's the point of cake if you can't eat it? You'd have to start charging for having the cake.
The current practice of limited investment is reasonable and helps keep the system self funded without much in the way of account fees. It's not as if banks are investing the funds in the equity market. Appreciate I'm commenting from afar and without emotion but these failures are normal. This kind of chaos makes the system stronger. And I think most commentators can agree that this is largely a symptom of a swift increase in the repo rate shortly after significant bond purchases by SVB. There are lessons to be learnt but I don't think if you were sitting on the SVB board and were part of the decision to purchase these low risk bonds did you in any way think it would lead to this outcome.
They didn't have risk officer for months. They lobbied to repeal regulations. And I don't blame them, that's their incentives.
At 10x leverage, when you're correctly assuming your customers will be bailed by the government instead of you getting criminally prosecuted, the worst you can lose is 100% of your money. With the kind of leverage you get in a bank, you don't even need to have positive expectation value investment to have positive expectation value for the bank shareholders.
even with completely trash odds of 50% chance of losing it all and 50% chance of earning only 20% with 10x free client deposit leverage, your expectation value is still 100%!
This is the moral hazard you're dealing with. At 10x leverage ratios of banks, they can take the worst possible bets and still win so long as their maximal loss is just losing all the investment.
You're just encouraging this behavior. This latest decision gives a huge incentives to all banks out there to blow out. Just the incentive structure alone is enough to collapse the entire financial system at this point. It was already eating itself and it's only going to get worse.
It's just a matter of time before they blow it beyond repair.
Why would customers being made whole (at the cost of wiping out all equity and possibly at some cost to other banks) affect the incentives of banks in this kind of situation? What would banks do differently if account holders could lose everything over $250k? If they are happy to “gamble with 10x leverage” then presumably they don’t care about impact to their customers. If bank management risked jail time that might change incentives but doing that doesn’t seem to require a cost to account holders.
Customers should be diversifying in these situations. It’s easy enough to set up a sweep. Those that don’t for whatever reason shouldn’t get bailed out for their poor decision making. That’s de facto subsidizing any future banks that want to make risky investments.
