Yes. Because many would like to see the world burn so they can feel vindicated. I support Bitcoin, but I also believe in real world we have to accept things for what they are, and improve things through incremental change. Not burn-it-all-down revolutions with ridiculous fantasies of building utopia from the ashes.

I have no respect for the "burn it all down" argument. None.

Yes, I understand how fractional reserve banking works. I understand that many bitcoiners agree with Murray Rothbard that FRB is a fraud. I also understand that 5000 people are going to try and explain this to me and get on their moral high horse now to shared their received wisdom with me.

I don't support letting people get hurt to make a point about fractional reserve banking or bitcoin.

This will probably be very unpopular among people here, given the sentiments I'm seeing here, but while I didn't think SVB should be bailed out, for reasons I elucidated, I do think the FDIC should likely intervene with First Republic this weekend. It is as well of a capitalized bank as any other bank in the US, and ordinary people and businesses are going to lose money for no other reason than hysteria brought on by the SVB collapse.

I'm aware of how the system works.

Which is why when a bank run starts, it never stops. It becomes purely about psychology.

I have money in First Republic, actually.

Because once it starts, it becomes a race for everyone to get their money out at the same time. In reality, there is no objective reason to panic other than the fact everyone else is panicking. That's the point. Arguments about the merits of fractional reserve banking are kind of besides the point right now. That's academic right now. This is people's lives and livelihood in the here and now.

It's the collective panic that's going to cause them all to lose their money. FRB isn't a badly capitalized bank. In fact, it's better capitalized than most.

Yes. But this panic is not rational.

There is a full-on run on the bank at First Republic today. People lined up out the doors of their branches moving their money out. Kind of insane. First Republic was *probably* fine. But a full on bank run is almost certainly going to cause them to collapse on Monday.

Yeah, SVB failed because of an deposit duration/asset maturity mismatch, which couldn’t be corrected due to the cost of rolling those assets, which was a result of terrible risk management on their balance sheet. Their completely loss of liquidity was a function of that. Not a function of the bank being insolvent.

Although, there’s no evidence their reserves at SVB are *gone*. On paper, there appears to be enough assets at the bank to pay out all the depositors in the coming weeks. And the bond market is trading as if that’s true. I would bet, contrary to the doomer narrative, that nearly 100%, if not 100% of deposits are going to be recovered.

Season 3 feels like the revisiting the franchise deserved, at least.

Yes. You should just watch S3 and pretend the first two seasons don't exist. Absolutely.

I'm not just saying this to emphasize that Season 3 is good (it is). But really to emphasize what flaming piles of trash the first two seasons were -- which they are. I'm surprised the show even got renewed for a third season. But I'm glad they did, so Terry Matalas could un-fuck the catastrophic damage that was done. Which he seems to have done a pretty good job at.

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 is the only season they should have ever made. In fact, they should just delete season's 1 and 2, pretend they never existed and re-label Season 3 to Season 1 and edit out all references to Picard now being an Android. Also, Paramount should fire Alex Kurtzman.

The risk-free rate is nearly at 5% right now! Has anyone seen how shitty LP returns have been on average over the past 5 years? SVB had all their eggs in that basket, and they designed a balance sheet with a duration risk and asset strategy that didn’t take into account the possibility the music could stop. And the music has been stopping. Ask any founder who has tried to raise in the past six months.

I really think SVB is a symptom of the VC bubble bursting more than it is evidence of a systemic failure of the US banking system beginning a-la 2008. I assume that’s not what a lot of people who follow me want to hear. But I think it happens to be true.