I don’t wanna get too ahead of myself but we may be about to see a major public reckoning on what on earth banks even are and what they are supposed to do.
SVB didn’t go down due to “the tech bubble” or really anything to do with “banking Silicon Valley” being a bad idea. if anything, it’s a great idea! Their deposits went up ~2.5x in 2 years because there was a shit load of cash that needed to be banked! (debate separately to what extent that was a ZIRP phenomenon. I’m not saying this was good in the grand scheme of things. just that, in context, it was good business).
the problem is what to put the money in. most nocoiners seem to think that their deposits just sit there “as money,” and although I’m sure they don’t imagine notes in a vault, exactly, to a large extent that was true for SVB: they held treasuries - the “risk free” asset lmfao - which is as close to cash as you can get in a liquid security.
the conundrum here is that there literally is no such thing as “liquid dollars” - there is only credit. all dollar assets are somebody else’s debt. for all intents and purposes, treasuries *are dollars*. the idea of “keeping it in cash” at the relevant magnitudes is literally nonsensical. what would it even mean? deposit it at *another bank*? that hardly solves the problem!
the further you tug at this thread, the more you realise that dollars can only really be defined as vacuous promises by the US government to … one day give you slightly more dollars?!? that realisation is now getting aired in public.
I think the first consequence as this starts to sink in will be a massive preference for shorter term debt that can just be rolled over and over and over because the lesson of SVB is the duration sensitivity is absolutely not worth it. you can literally evaporate hundreds of billions of dollars by getting that just a little wrong even though you didn’t have much of a choice (“RISK FREE ASSET” LOLOLOLOLOLOL) this is yet another example of fiat driving up time preference and corrupting the information signals necessary to coordinate long-term capital investment. but oh well, the currency is collapsing so we have bigger fish to fry than the yield of long-dated bonds 😂
but the juicy bit is that we may be on the cusp of this reasoning, and the insanity of fractional reserve and central banking, finally being aired in public as people try to make sense of all this.
or maybe not, I dunno. maybe I’m naive. but I’m also bullish 🤙
