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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34508 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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It's more a historical thing. 25 years ago, when startups were less of "a thing", a lot of traditional banks didn't approve a startup account because the below looks really weird if you're used to servicing traditional businesses.

  1. Someone with no commercial history or credit

  2. Who wants a credit card

  3. Then who one day deposits millions of dollars

  4. And the next months dollars get sent out and the bank balance goes down

  5. With minimal consistent income

These days it's more that you ask some random person in the startup world, VC, or lawyer, and they go "yeah, a plurality of the people I know use SVB" and that's not where you spend your precious hours as a founder trying to differentiate your company so you just go with the flow.

Though, next week every single founder is going to be taking money out of First Republic, Citizens, Fifth Third, Capital One, BNY Mellon, etc. and wiring it straight to JPM. I suspect there will be a broader bank run.

Though, next week every single founder is going to be taking money out of First Republic, Citizens, Fifth Third, Capital One, BNY Mellon, etc. and wiring it straight to JPM.

Isn't that a bad idea, though? Doing the exact same "all our eggs in one basket" that took down SVB? Being an ordinary idiot, I would have thought the lesson here was "Okay, for the love of God let's keep our payroll in this bank and make sure we have enough to cover six months' wages, then put the running costs money in this other bank" and so on. I realise that makes it a lot of bother to set up and maintain individual accounts, but if you've just had "oops, the bank where we kept all our money just imitated a dead goldfish", wouldn't you try and spread the load around?

It doesn't have to be JP Morgan in particular. Any of the Big 4 (JPM, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo) are both well-diversified and too-big-to-fail. I don't know why anyone with deposits over the FDIC insurance limit of $250,000 would have sensitive money anywhere else.

Apparently the traditional banks were right to be worried.

How so? I’d really like to understand the logic of this position.

I suppose if you're a big bank and startups are only a tiny fraction of your business it would be okay, but its hard to manage risk if you can't predict when customers will deposit and when customers will withdraw.

Cramer cursed JPM, though, so the question becomes- how superstitious are the people making decisions about this?

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