quick addendum so as not to sound too holier-than-thou: I have non-negligible deposits in fiat banks but i) it would be impossible for me not to and still function like a normal human, ii) with this in mind, I do my best to minimise it, and iii) if (when) it all disappears, I wonāt blame anybody except myself. itās a calculated risk and itās nobody elseās problem.
Iām not sure I can be bothered tweeting this coz I donāt want to deal with the negative pushback, but equally I do want to vent so I can sleep soundly:
if you deposit in a fiat bank, you are an unsecured creditor. you are not a victim. the real victims are those furthest from the fiat spigot, who are persistently priced out of ever accumulating capital, and whose time will be stolen *yet again* to plug the gap of fake value destroyed by this latest round of insane leverage collapsing.
the idea that it is crass to be rooting for bank failures or opposing clear-cut short-term fixes has a certain sentimental appeal but is ultimately asinine.
THE BANKS ARE ALL GOING TO FAIL.
the longer it takes, the worse it is going to be for exactly the people who are harmed by it happening now. if you really care about them, you want this out of the way as quickly as possible. but the idea you can just close your eyes and procrastinate this all away is juvenile. it is arguably even *the cause* of the problem. this could have been dealt with at any point in the past 50 years, but no. we just kept borrowing more than it is possible to repay and consuming more than it is possible to produce.
at some point people need to learn to take responsibility. ignorance is not an excuse unless you are also willing to pay the entire price yourself, which, note, nobody whining about this is. you can tell because, if they were, they wouldnāt be whining.
ābut I thought I was a depositor!ā <> āI donāt give a fuck what you *thought* - you were lazy and you were wrong. and you are asking the already poor and already fucked over by your ignorance to pick up the tab for it *again*. learn what is actually happening and have the balls to fix it.ā
feel free to quote me to anybody you think needs to hear that.
mrs allen: āI feel like we should be shorting thingsā š¤
I was just gonna say āSave Tech. Save VCs. Save Americaā and otherwise trust its fate to the viral winds ā¦
sneak peak you guys before we hit the bird app:
as happy as I am for your spiritual growth in the last five minutes, I must ask, since we are here, if you have any edits?
hereās the first draft: edit like the wind!
***
*Make SVB Depositors Whole - 1 of ~120*
On March 10th, Silicon Valley Bank went out of business. This has left thousands of tech startups and venture capitalists unable to make payroll, to manage their billings, and to make the world a better place.
The Tech industry is the beating heart of American dynamism and it is difficult to imagine the extent to which working people across the US - and possibly across the world - will suffer if the depositors of the bank are not made whole.
With interest rates at staggering decadal highs, there seems to be little possibility of financing a restructuring of the bank on the open market. The scope of world-changing innovation supported by SVB and brought about by its depositors has consequences so profound, and so far in the future, that it is frankly unfair to try to value it using the politically questionable discount rates cruelly imposed top-down by the government in recent weeks and months. The only solution is a bottom-up effort to save this vital engine of growth, prosperity, opportunity, progress, and change.
This is why we are asking for $1bn to ensure the tech startup and venture capital community is not made to suffer unnecessarily for the sins of the credit markets. Please note this is the maximum GoFundMe will allow and so we expect to need to do this around 119 more times. But we have to start somewhere. We have to try. We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Save Tech. Save the VCs. Save America.
that has literally nothing to do with what happened here. you are being distracted by a laser pen.
Iām starting a GoFundMe to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. the target is $1bn because thatās the most GoFundMe will allow, so I will say that we probably need to do this 119 or so more times.
shoot me a nostr DM if you wanna workshop the pitch or contribute any good jokes š
Iām about to be offline for a few hours to watch rugby but when I get back I expect to get these creative juices flowing!
this wasnāt a joke btw, Iām literally doing it. stay tuned.
(I mean, it *was* a joke, but it made me laugh so much thatās actually why I decided to do it)
I donāt 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 didnāt go down due to āthe tech bubbleā or really anything to do with ābanking Silicon Valleyā being a bad idea. if anything, itās 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. Iām 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 āas money,ā and although Iām sure they donāt imagine notes in a vault, exactly, to a large extent that was true for SVB: they held treasuries - the ārisk freeā 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 āliquid dollarsā - there is only credit. all dollar assets are somebody elseās debt. for all intents and purposes, treasuries *are dollars*. the idea of ākeeping it in cashā 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 ā¦ 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 didnāt have much of a choice (āRISK FREE ASSETā 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 š
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 Iām naive. but Iām also bullish š¤
oooooh yeaaaaaah baby. got my pub table booked.
this game was awesome:
they are laughing at you