Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.
> Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always
Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail?
So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?
So we all now know that a bailout DID occur with the SVB depositors who had all their money in the bank and most deposits were over the FDIC insurance limit. The FDIC insurance rules somehow didn't apply here because there was too much money at risk. (And too big to fail).
But if there was a bank failure at a regionally smaller bank with a regular customer or startup depositing the same amount of money over the insurance limit, their money is gone.
Just like Intel got a "bailout" from investment as chosen by the US government, AI will eventually have a very similar story.
In early 2023, within the span of two months, the United States
experienced three out of the four largest commercial bank failures in
U.S. history, as Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic
Bank all toppled.1 Yet, despite these banks having roughly $300 billion in
uninsured deposits at the time of their failures2 and despite the failures
costing the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) of the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC) an estimated $38 billion, uninsured
depositors took no losses in any of the failures.3 While these results were
striking, they were far from unusual. Since 2008, uninsured depositors
have experienced losses in only 6% of total U.S. bank failures.
...
Formally,
the United States caps deposit insurance at $250,000 per account,6 but,
in reality, the post-2008 financial system comes close to providing de
facto total deposit insurance covering all amounts in all accounts.
> My worst interview was at Uber (their security team).
Worst? It sounds like a great interview where you set a boundary before going into a situation you would not have liked. People forget that part of the interview process is also for the candidate to decide if they want to work for the company.
Mine was also free range in an older neighborhood/suburb with a highway on two sides and river on the other two. The only rule I had was not to cross the highway, but even that rule was eventually relaxed as there were better fishing ponds on the other side of the highway and I just had to tell parents/be careful. I was also a latchkey kid (along with all my friends) so I'd get home from school, drop my books and turn right around and head to my friend's houses.
Like you, it wasn't always easy, but I think made me a stronger person overall.
Side note...I hate this stat because it makes it sound like the rich are paying their share of taxes. The reality is that people who make large w2 income pay a large part of federal taxes, and while they would be considered rich they are not the ultra-rich we see in the news every day.
> .I hate this stat because it makes it sound like the rich are paying their share of taxes
Yes! I agree, I don't mean to sound like I support the status quo. In this particular case, I wanted to clarify that green card-holding immigrants carry a disproportionate amount of tax burden (but that is not to support the current state of things).
I didn't mean to imply you did support the status quo. And you're right about GC holders as they tend to make good money and fall into the worst spot tax wise - having a large w2 income.
Correct and it's a typical process for many countries. You get a visa so you can stay past the tourist time (often 90 days and with an intent to apply for residency), and then while in country you apply for residency (the green card). One of the issues in the US is the process can take so long you end up overstaying your visa. Logically you should be able to extend the visa or the gov. shouldn't care since it's their fault it's taking so long. But, it's better for one side to simply declare these people illegal.
> The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income
Many countries have higher rates than the US and have reciprocal treaties to avoid double taxation. In practice it means many people end up paying zero taxes to the US. Of course it will depend on the country you want to reside in, but then what's the point of seeking out a US passport?
> There are already far too many US college grads who can’t get jobs.
Recent college grads have had a harder time, but is slowly improving again [1]. All college grads are around 3% which is usually considered full employment. It was so easy for so long, any reversion to normal is met with the sky is falling. We haven't really seen that yet. The job market is also much much larger than big tech.
In my own experience trying to hire people, it's hard to filter real resumes from fakes/garbage. I have to think this issue is making it slower to hire recent grads.
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