> Larry Summers warned against “moral hazard lectures” and demanded SVB depositors be made whole immediately in 2023, months after calling student loan relief inflationary and unfair. Moral hazard for borrowers, bailouts for banks. Not lost on the public.
I can't believe I'm about to say something that could be construed as a defense of Larry Summers, but here goes: bank depositors are not engaging in risky behavior, they are putting cash in a bank. SVB did not get bailed out, it failed.
And as some of who supports the student loan forgiveness, yes, it is slightly inflationary but I think the benefits out weigh the inflationary effects.
Combine this with the "need" for nuclear (a perfectly cromulent but excessively expensive power source which has cheaper zero-carbon options), in the first paragraph, these comments that are not about the main topic severely undermine my ability to trust the rest of the essay.
The lesson to myself is to be narrow when I write, so as not to bring in a bunch of other positions that also need to be defended.
I disagree about student loans. The entire system needs to be dismantled.
Universities don't care if their majors will result in a job and the student loans are a source of risk-free money.
They need to start taking on the risk of all student loan, not me, the tax payer.
Ok, but forgiving student loans doesn't do that. It signals to borrowers that they don't have to repay high loans if their career can't support it. It tells borrowers that they can make risky loans without a chance of default. It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them.
The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.
I’m always surprised that student loan forgiveness appeals to anyone who should otherwise be able to think about all of the bad second order effects.
The more we inject money into the education system, the higher prices go. Setting a precedent that the government will just pay off your loans if you don’t pay them off only encourages more people to take out loans without thinking about paying them back.
There are so many things wrong with this idea that I can’t believe it continues to be popular. The only thing I can think of is that it’s a litmus test for who can and cannot consider second order effects of economic decisions, or who believes money can spent en masse without altering the system.
Maybe, but that precedent has been set before for other types of loans, and in a limited way for student loans, and the sky didn’t fall. The upward price pressure on university prices is far more influenced by other factors (which should be fixed!). Loan forgiveness probably is a drop in the bucket, I suspect.
What are the second-order effects of a subclass of citizens permanently encumbered by debt that (with rare exceptions) cannot be discharged through bankruptcy?
Perhaps your analysis of second-order effects is not thorough and complete? Have you really considered all of them?
Not really sure why this is getting downvoted.
I don't really think we need to forgive student loans - I think they should absolutely be dischargeable through bankruptcy, though.
Bankruptcy isn't a "get out of jail free" card - it puts a huge burden on a student relatively soon after graduating that makes it harder to start a family or buy a home. So it incentives are still aligned for the students taking the loans.
But the option that a student defaults brings some real light and transparency into a loan system that just feels wildly disconnected from reality right now. If a student can't pay the loan back with the job options in the field and is like to default... don't issue the loan.
I think it's absolutely abusive that student debt can't be discharged, and is pretty heinous as policy.
Allowing student data to be canceled during bankruptcy would be a good first step (possibly even better than canceling student debt across the board).
To your point, making it easy to cancel debt teaches borrowers that debt isn’t a serious thing.
Requiring someone go through bankruptcy (and all of the associated negatives on your credit score, etc) seems like a good tradeoff. Allows you to get out from under the debt (the entire purpose of bankruptcy in the first place..) while not letting everyone pretend the debt never existed (need to live with the impact of bankruptcy on your ability to borrow in the future)
I don’t know why we don’t hear more people lobbying for this. I guess it’s because the sound bite isn’t as sexy.
Bankruptcy affects your credit score for 7-10 years. Someone who graduates from college in their early 20s with six figures in debt could file for bankruptcy immediately and have it be off their credit history by the time they've saved up a down payment and want to get a mortgage.
There is also the obvious drawback that if more people can discharge the debt, the interest rate goes up, and then everyone else has to pay for the people who took out loans they didn't pay back.
People who start lobbying for it quickly discover that 87% of people who petition for their student debt to be cancelled in bankruptcy get it (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/29/bankruptcy-student-loan-borr...). I support removing the special treatment entirely, but ultimately most student debt holders don’t go bankrupt.
> The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.
This. The whole student loan mess is a direct result of their special treatment during bankruptcy.
> It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them.
I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of tuition claw-back from schools, when a student loan goes into default (but only by the government, not private lenders). The universities need more skin in the game to keep tuition under control.
That's why it should be a one time event in conjunction with reworking the whole system.
Why can I, as an 18 year old, sign for a loan that _cannot_ be forgiven, graduate into a crashed economy, and still be held accountable for choices that impact me when I only had a small part in them? The system needs reformed, and we need to do something for the people still on the hook of the old system (and I say this as someone who has paid off all my student loans).
As a parent of a 16 and almost 14 year old i'm effectively home schooling personal finance with them. My wife and I got none from our parents and were preyed upon constantly. I think I was 45 when i finally got my student loans paid off. My wife did many years in a dangerous, low-performing, HS as a teacher to get hers forgiven. Sending an 18 year old off to college without a solid understanding of finance is like throwing an 18 year old in the ocean while bleeding profusely and tasking them with swimming to shore, maybe a couple make it but the sharks will get the rest.
Why would I work hard once I found out I was going to be defaulted X years from now?
That's not a solution at all, because it will price out way too many students.
The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).
> The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).
This is a totally fine system, but would change US tertiary education massively. Much of the state university increases in tuition since the GFC have been driven by exactly the opposite behaviour (cut state funding, make it up in tuition).
How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?
> How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?
University rankings are mostly nonsense. They generally over-weight English speaking universities because most of the "high impact" journals are in English. The UK also does well by these metrics, but fundamentally academic research and teaching are very different things, and incentivising high output research institutions to focus on the research breaks the social purpose of universities which is to turn out educated undergraduates.
The German model is to focus more on teaching, which is a more sustainable approach than chasing the finite research dollars.
Student loans currently carry no risk. They can't be discharged. Interest is the payment to the lender to accept risk. There is no risk in the current state of student loans. Therefore they should never-ever charge interest.
Also schools need to be reigned in, if GA et al can pay each student athlete $40,000 a month, they MUST be held accountable for burdening the students and the state with unscrupulous debt.
> Student loans currently carry no risk. They can't be discharged. Interest is the payment to the lender to accept risk.
you make a good point, if there's no risk there should be no interest. Or at worst, the interest rate should track COLA adjustments to social security. Some basic adjustment relative to inflation so the lender gets back what they lent out.
Now that schools can pay their athletes I hope the rest of the student body take notice and start asking questions about school funds allocation. It should make it plain as day to the average student that their school has plenty of cash and choses to force them into debt.
Interest also compensates for the other things that money could be doing. If I didn't loan it to you (or a student), then I would be doing something else with the money, even if just buying a government bond.
Around 6% of student loans are defaulted on. Some of those end up never being repaid while others are delayed substantially.
Also interest is payment for the combination of losing use of money + risk + inflation.
They should charge rate. But rate should be similar to say interbank rate. Maybe plus something like 0.5%. This is how standard loaning often operates. You have risk free lending so you get loan from somewhere else and then take some margin.
One downside is that money lent for a student loan cannot otherwise be invested. If paid back later with no interest, the money will likely have lost value to inflation in the meantime.
I think I agree with your broader point - just quibbling, here.
>. It signals to borrowers that they don't have to repay high loans if their career can't support it.
The loan forgiveness wasn't a thing when many students took out the loans.
The German model is pretty good. Tuition prices are reasonable. If you're studying something statistically considered a good investment - you get free tuition. If not, you pay for it.
Great example of narrow rationality. Huge amount of Americas current problems can be traced back to a poorly educated population. Universal access to third level education, combined with a school system designed to educate - in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate; would massively improve pretty much ever aspect of American life.
The market lens is myopic, the market cannot be expected to produce social goods in proportion to necessity - that's not any part of its function.
I agree that the student loan system is insane. Students need grants to cover cost of living while they focus on learning, education itself of course should be free.
I agree with you about student loan forgiveness, but disagree with your assessment of universities as a system. The humanities (which are highly profitable for the university) are suffering an existential crisis because their funding keeps getting cut, while STEM programs (which have low or even negative ROI after lab/equipment/resource costs) keep getting expanded. There's obviously more nuance to that, but at a high level, universities are prioritizing majors which have higher job placement at the expense of their own bottom line.
How about clawbacks from the universities.
For all loans? What if a person takes a loan to get into a medical program but can't find a job after and defaults the loan.
Is the university responsible? The arguments seem to be based on majors that have a poor job market.
Is this actually true?
I think about my lab classes and typically these were separate credit hours. More money to the university. Outside chemistry, we were using outdated equipment that wasn't getting refreshed/bought new.
If what you are saying is true, Humanities needs to cut costs of their credit hours or double down. For entertainment degrees (art, music), its prohibitively expensive to casually obtain the education. For business/politics/psychology, there is at least some sort of return on investment to be expected.
"Labs" as in the physical facilities, not the class credits. Computer labs are one example - my school had a Linux lab that, uh, wasn't much used outside of CS/IT/maybe EE. There's also lab equipment for research professors - a nice oscilloscope can cost more than a new car, and students won't ever actually get to use that. Not saying it's wrong - I really appreciated that Linux lab - but it's definitely not equality between departments.
For your second point, I've never heard of a university that charges different credit rates for different majors (outside of special stuff like paying for certain PE classes), but that seems like it would be a university policy, not a department policy.
if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce), then it should be funded through public funds-- government should pay for education.
If it does in fact lead to better outcomes, then the higher tax will cover the cost.
running it through the private system builds in too many perverse incentives.
The US government already subsidizes higher education. And all the state governments do as well. So this is already happening.
It’s not at all clear we need to increase the level of subsidy, the rate of college attendance is very high right now compared to past history.
>if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce)
It doesn't achieve this; the % of college graduates has vastly increased over the past few decades, but this hasn't contributed to any significant improvements in standardised measures of graduate knowledge or intelligence. From a business perspective the primarily usage of college is as a filter, a proxy for intelligence and willingness to follow instructions, but its usefulness as a filter has been steadily decreasing as it becomes easier and easier to attend and graduate from college.
That doesn't work, because the Universities benefitting from the high-risk student loans are not the ones making bank from their grants and endowments. This is an imagined enemy fallacy. What you're really doing is demanding that Harvard somehow make whole the defrauded students of the University of Phoenix.
Now, sure, there's a genuine argument that those diploma factory schools aren't providing valuable service and are just parasites subsisting on public loan guarantees while their students bear the risk. But that's not a financial argument, it's a regulatory one.
No one thinks that people shouldn't be allowed to float a Stanford degree on loans, and "dismantling the entire system" just guarantees that we return to the era where only the rich could afford Ivy degrees.
If you had a choice between nothing being done and forgiving student loans which would you pick?
Second. Let's say universities did take on the burden of loans, of course that would be via a bank right?
If that's the case. How would they enforce risk? Based on certain majors? Who would give a loan with no collateral to young people with no credit on the hopes the major they picked had a viable job market years from that point?
So you believe universities have taken advantage of students by crafting, encouraging and financing education programs with an understanding that those programs would not result in jobs which would be sufficient to repay the debt needed to complete them, but you think the 18 year olds who were taken advantage of should be forced to suffer for their failure to make perfect decisions at 18.
Cool. Cool.
So you believe uninvolved taxpayers should be on the hook when the 18 year olds make bad decisions.
Cool cool.
The decision to invent a new special type of debt for student loans was a political decision made by our representatives. To the extent that the voters/taxpayers are responsible for anything: this is our shared mess.
I mean, the whole premise of representative democracy is that we’re responsible for the messes we send representatives to make. If we don’t want that responsibility, I guess we’d have to look at alternatives to representative democracy, but that’s a pretty big topic.
Should post grad be funded by the government? Yes. Next question.
Feel like I'm answering whether or not public schools should be a thing from some 19th century peasant.
It's a question of supply and demand though. Sure we should fund science post grad, I'm not so sure about humanities (supply already outstrips demand there). Saying we should fund "post grad" in general elides this complexity.
Public school is as much about providing babysitters for parents that have to work as it is about education. Notice how hard it is to be expelled from public school. Grades are irrelevant. This is very different from how post secondary education operates.
Do I believe in community, empathy, kindness toward my fellow human beings? Why, yes. Yes I do. Am I willing to pay a few bucks to put my money where my mouth yes. Why yes, yes I am.
What if someone else thinks that there are better (more kind, empathetic) uses of that money than funding someone's college? Why is "free college" the most kind and empathetic thing we can do with this money?
The unfortunate reality is that your kindness and empathy is a resource that is being exploited by unseen actors.
You are being taken for a ride and you feel good about it.
I absolutely support maximizing access to education and I'm willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to prop up a giant unsecured-loan grift that transfers financial risk onto those least able to bear it, while universities jack up their tuition to grab their slice of this new pie.
No they’re saying that the schools should repay the loans, not the government
You take on the risk every time you pay the local school district's real estate taxes. Well to be fair that's even riskier. After all you have no idea if the kindergartner will go on to get a college degree and start paying taxes. It's actually riskier than student loan bail outs.
> And as some of who supports the student loan forgiveness, yes, it is slightly inflationary but I think the benefits out weigh the inflationary effects.
Being slightly inflationary is a strawman concern. Student loan forgiveness has a major problem in that it’s a large reward the goes only to a specific slice of society who match some arbitrary criteria and who have useful degrees. It also fails to address the root cause of the problem, letting current generations accumulate debt in the same way.
It’s an idea that appeals to a subset of the voter base for whom a college graduate with loan debt represents the prototypical struggling young person, but ignores all of the young people who are even worse off and don’t have college degrees either.
Spending a huge amount of money to forgive student loans would be politically catastrophic in ways that a lot of people who live in highly educated middle class bubbles don’t realize. There are a lot of people struggling out there, but college graduates are not at the top of the list of people who need the most help.
> bank depositors are not engaging in risky behavior
Supposedly intelligent investors leaving money in accounts above FDIC limits ($250k per holder per bank, so $500k for joint account) were engaging in risky laziness.
So what do you do when your payroll is more than $200k? The depositors were not treating SVB as investment, they were bank accounts for doing transactions.
Sweeps and obo accounts are the bone simple answer to this that every mainline treasury has used for this problem for at least 30 years.
Further the banking ecosystem in the US is predicated on the idea that depositors, especially large ones, are doing their own diligence on the health of the bank.
The depositors were using SVB because SVB was willing to hand out loans to startups with no revenue that other creditors wouldn't fund, right? Using a less reliable vendor to get a better rate is a risk, whether that vendor is supplying labor or parts or banking services.
One could argue that the depositors didn't know SVB was unreliable, but that's kind of undercut by the fact that there was a run on the bank in the first place.
There are banks that sweep the money across various other banks automatically.
That's not our problem to solve, but seeing how millions of other businesses were able to pay people maybe it's SVB that needs to figure out how to do this and not lowly commentators.
Millions of other businesses do not have a secret strategy to pay people without ever landing >>$200k in a single account. Their banks just didn’t fail so it wasn’t a problem.
Buy private deposit insurance.
A corporation can hold t-bills and cash equivalents instead of relying on a bank account where the $250K FDIC limit will bite them.
This notion that the $250K FDIC insurance limit is an acceptable part of our system, except in cases where a bank fails and the depositors are... sympathetic? It's incredibly silly.
Use your political power to lobby for making electronic money transfers a government operated utility.
Buy insurance for this type of situation. It's not like Silicon Valley lacks the funds to buy insurance. The rest of us are MANDATED to buy insurance for our cars and our healthcare, and many of us live paycheck to paycheck.
Silicon Valley, however, home to the world's greatest concentrations of private wealth? Oh no, thats a too much to ask that they play by the same rules.
Multiple accounts?
It is a little bold to ask FDIC to payout more than what the terms of the policy dictate. Try that with any other insurance on the planet!
> bank depositors are not engaging in risky behavior, they are putting cash in a bank
That is risky behavior. You can't earn interest without taking a risk.
Is there a lower risk, lower interest option with the same capabilities (ability to use the money to pay others)?
Genuine question, I have no idea, but I didn't choose my bank based on interest rate. I can't pay bills or transfer money if it's cash under the mattress.
One round of loan forgiveness is fine, but it builds an expectation of it in the future. All of the loans, growing larger and larger, just encourage universities to grow fatter and raise costs to students.
If students could not borrow enough to attend, they would be forced to lower costs (not necessarily the very top universities, but all the rest).
The student loan system is fucked up, so what should happen is an acknowledgement that it's fucked up, forgiving the fucked up loans, and also changing the system to be less fucked up so it won't have to happen again.
A reasonable option. But was that on the table? Or was "just student loan forgiveness with no change to the system" what was being proposed?
And if that was the proposal, would that be better or worse than the current status quo?
Healthcare is in exactly the same boat.
A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums.
The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
Everything is on the table if people vote for it.
It's already unaffordable, enrollment is dropping, and tuition has only continued to go up to offset lower enrollment.
The incentives are not so naively simple
Population trends are a pretty big factor in enrollment. Most enrollment is by fresh high school grads. And there are significantly fewer of those then there were 10 years ago; you can make up some of that by expanding eligibility and encouraging more young people to go to college (even those that would be better served doing something else), or expanding international admissions (but maybe not in this administration).
Cost is certainly also a factor, but I suspect population is a bigger factor.
The solution to that is rebuilding the state and federal funding for higher education with added regulations on where and how that money can be spent (perhaps even putting tuition caps in play).
The reason universities are so expensive is there is no limit on how much they can charge for tuition and no requirements on how much they pay their professors. It allows them to dump a huge portion of their funds into the marketing and athletic departments.
I know of a few religious universities who's mission is mainly to educate (so their well educated members can pay back more money to the church). While they do subsidize the educational costs, it isn't by as much as you'd think and it does result in some very cheap education.
There's no reason the government couldn't do exactly the same thing. It did right up until reagan.
> encourage universities to grow fatter
In a typical state school, where's most of the fat accumulating? What could be cut significantly without affecting the quality of education?
Just can't help humming in my head reg yoo la toe ree cap chur
Any system that can juice itself by increasing both funding and cost will scale both until the natural incentive gradients (are you smart? do you actually want to do stuff or do you just want a desk job?) vanish into the noise. When everyone went to college, nobody learned anything.
University is one of those things you always want to be capability rather than means gated, but those of means will always want their kids to get in regardless of how they were raised. After all, they worked hard. Why should their kids? They will ally with every convenient rationalization in order to moralize for the politics, taking advantage of arguments about "disadvantaged backgrounds" etc to treat everything as a means problem, but the goal is to dilute the capability aspect, and that robs talent.
If you have exceptional talent, you need to know the truth. Systems naturally try to optimize the dumb-rich to smart ratio so that there's a lot of subsidy available for anyone who actually needs to be there, but consequent GPA inflation demands that we make the education somewhat meaningless, so you're really on your own to set goals, and any good ones are way higher. Check the boxes, take the free lunch, and then treat the overall coddling like a charade that must be ignored. Then again, isn't self direction always that way?
I think the point wound be to eliminate all borrowing for tuition. It would be drastic and universities would complain the whole time but band-aid has to be ripped off at some point. I don't think a solution other than welding shut the money font will have a meaningful effect.
* Eliminate the entire federal student loan program. Just gone. No more loans.
* Make it so that private loans for tuition and related expenses can be trivially discharged. Like just fill out a form and it's auto-approved. You can just decide to not pay your student loans with no repercussions whatsoever. There's probably a better way to accomplish this legally but make it so that they're toxic to private lenders.
Once the money officially dries up and less than 1% of families could pay out of pocket for current tuition rates then we watch as jobs stop requiring degrees, apprenticeships become popular, and schools belt-tighten to focus on student ROI. Watch magically as GE requirements evaporate and we find out they weren't ever necessary in the first place. Watch as high schools get pressured to teach actually useful things instead of being grade school the sequel.
Your solution means that only the wealthy can attend university, someone who grew up poor wouldn’t stand a chance.
Your argument is basically that current university costs are intrinsic and can't possibly be reduced but we know that isn't true. We have not two generations ago people paying for their college tuition with money from their part time jobs.
My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor.
Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a good chunk of university classes are 30-100 people paying for a single dude and a room with chairs to lecture for 5 hours a week. This doesn't have to be ruinously expensive.
other poorer countries just pay all or most tuition for students and own the universities
The State governments do own many universities. To a large extent, the government is responsible for the current situation.
Also some of the universities are older than the government by hundreds of years and private, the government can’t just “own” them.
In most such countries there is also an entrance exam requirement that would exclude most student loan borrowers in the US.
As someone who supports education loan forgiveness, I say we do as our elders have and just take from them without a whiff of concern for their grandstanding about morality.
What obligation to the generation that's been aware of physical evidence of climate change for decades and ignored it?
The old dying and the youth rewriting social and political custom and truism is a physical constant of the universe.
Physics is ageist; sorry/not sorry grandparents.
It's expensive because it's not built in series, unlike say korea or china or russia.
Both loan forgiveness and nuclear have huge benefits
Student loan forgiveness yes, paid for by the schools that let people rack up debt for low value degrees.
In the olden days student loans qualification depended on the students degree program and grades, and there wasn’t any repayment problem
larry summers? the epstein guy?
> bank depositors are not engaging in risky behavior,
Because the taxpayers (and all users of USD) repeatedly bail them out. I could define anything as not being risky if I knew taxpayers would bail it out.
More importantly, if there is no risk, what purpose does a bank serve? They’re a pretty bloated middleman if their sole purpose is to update a database to reflect incoming and outgoing cash flow. The government should be able to offer that service for free.
Depositors are lending their money to the bank at low interest. They may seek risk in terms of increased yield on their savings account, but FDIC insured banks will have trouble meeting their requirements while offering high yields on their accounts.
Banks provide security for deposits as well as liquidity (velocity of money), and slight inflationary pressure.
Wiping out depositors doesn't prevent much moral hazard since the depositors are unsophisticated, so they are unable to differentiate risk among banks.
Banking is a basic utility. Penalizing customers of a business for the business going under is bonkers. We learned this lesson during the Great Depression.
Bank shareholders or creditors are engaging in risky behavior and should face the full consequences of bank failures. No bailouts for them.
I dislike that the SVB bailout happened without a revision to FDIC insurance rules. It felt like a good time to reevaluate those rules (if the limit needs to be raised then lets raise it) and encode the new version to ensure consistency of insurance going forward. SVB accounts getting a full bailout without any formal shift towards that being the future policy felt arbitrary - either we want that policy or we don't - lets not just change the rules for a single case.
> SVB bailout
There wasn't any bailout at all. This entire thread is so confusing. But yes they got 2 days or something of deposit freeze IIRC.
My apologies on the imprecise language - maybe "extension of FDIC account insurance beyond the standard 250k limit to depositors" is better terming?
SVB came out of this broke - as they should for such mismanagement - but the concern is that depositors were made whole beyond the amount usually insured by the FDIC.
It's not a question of terminology. As you say, SVB came out of it broke, but their stuff didn't burn to the ground - their operations and assets were taken over by a bridge institution Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, which was then quickly acquired by First Citizens Bank. Where's the point where the depositors should have lost money? Would it have been fair for First Citizens to tell every customer who had over $250k in their account "sorry, we've taken the rest as an acquisition bonus"?
Agreed.
> Because the taxpayers (and all users of USD) repeatedly bail them out.
The taxpayer didn't pay for those bailouts. They were funded by the DIF, which was replenished by premiums that banks pay.
> They’re a pretty bloated middleman if their sole purpose is to update a database to reflect incoming and outgoing cash flow.
Did you just look into what banks do at all before making this claim? If that were the case, companies like Apple, Bilt, and Robinhood wouldn't be relying on real banks and could easily start their own.
There has been a lot of discussion about how the basic setup of banks (borrow short, lend long, collect the spread) is probably not a great idea, and we should just separate these two activities (see Money Stuff). People who want to lend long should do that with their own money, and people who just want to save should be able to do that.
But, at least in the US, regulators keep blocking the 1st step: narrow banking. Let banks offer savings accounts that just stick the money in the Fed, zero risk.
> Because the taxpayers bail them out. I could define anything as not being risky if I knew taxpayers would bail it out.
I feel like I must be misunderstanding something here because it sounds like you're saying depositing funds in a bank is considered risky behaviour?
It is supposed to be if the amounts are above $250,000. I have no problem with the first $250k being risk free, that is a policy that is well published and that we all "agree" on. Making arbitrary policy decisions that in some cases depositors should be made whole when risky behavior (such as depositing above the insurance limit) bites them is problematic. Stick to the policy or change the policy don't make one off exceptions because that sets weird expectations.
89% of deposits at SVB were uninsured.
Taxpayers don't bail out bank depositors, the FDIC (which is insurance paid for by the banks) does.
And banks do a lot more than what you described, which I have to assume you know already.
Insurance priced for damages capped at $250k per person per bank or whatever it is. If the insurance covered unlimited damages, then this wouldn’t be a discussion.
Yes. What are these repeated bailouts by taxpayers that you mentioned?
And you can't think of any way that the federal government providing retail banking services could possibly go wrong?
The FDIC insures $200k of deposits because banks are not supposed to be risky. Thats taxpayers bailing out everybody in order to keep banks as "not risky"
In particular the article incorrectly states that the bank was bailed out. It was not. The bank failed. Depositors who were running their non-profit in the Bay Area did not lost all their charitable contributions.
The bank failed because it had placed deposits into US Treasury bonds that were temporarily worth less for sale on the open market than they would be at maturity. When Peter Thiel started a bank run by telling all his investments to pull their funds, that exposed the SCB mismanagement.
When the depositors were bailed out, taxpayers didn't lost anything, it was a wash. We could have paid at bond maturity or now, but it made little difference to us.
> When Peter Thiel started a bank run by telling all his investments to pull their funds, that exposed the SCB mismanagement.
I think he did more than that. He either has precognition Nostradamus would be proud of or he absolutely had insider information, and a good amount of it.
1. He knew that when the bank closure would be, because despite how the FDIC has very detailed and historically very successful efforts at keeping such plans highly confidential (for obvious reasons), like agents in hotels under fake names, etc., he told his investments on Wednesday night that "all funds must be out of SVB by COB Thursday". FDIC rolled into SVB 8am Friday morning.
2. He had also had instructed another of his companies to build a website and app that was able to handle applications for business bridge loans, and it "needed to be tested, and ready to go live, by noon on Friday".
Also, not for nothing, causing a bank run is a federal felony.
What about banking regulations that mandated that SBC put those deposits into treasury bonds?
The bailout did not accelerate bond maturity. Those were picked up by other Banks when assets were sold off.
Last, who is the other banks that paid for the bailout, not taxpayers, at least not directly. If you call higher FDIC insurance rates for JPMorgan Chase a taxpayer cost, how does that logic scale to the rest of the economy?
From first principles public pension funds are broken.
The "Safe Withdrawal Rate" assumed by many private individuals planning for their own retirement assumes a withdrawal rate in the 3 - 4% range based on the "trinity study" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study
Meanwhile, American public pensions are structurally engineered around a 7%+ SWR - this was recently confirmed again by the median goal by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.
The perpetual "under funded" nature, and all the return hunting etc in pension fund management can be explained by that disconnect.
But this then belies a very uncomfortable acknowledgement which is that we cannot afford the government workforce currently in place requiring us to either:
(a) Raise taxes to increase contributions.
Or
(b) Somehow make due with less government :)
Individuals saving for retirement must deal with the risk that they live to an old age and their savings must last for decades. Pension plans have a higher safe withdrawal rate, because people on the average have average lifespans. When a plan member dies early, their remaining contributions can be used (partially or in full) to fund other members' pensions.
Only taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans get to use 7%+. Because they have the power to use future taxpayers’ money to pay for underfunding/underperformance/corruption from the past. And obviously, politicians that would choose to increase taxes today for something that could but punted to the future would lose elections.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 mandates that non taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans use discount rates from high grade corporate bond yield curves, which are much lower.
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/pension-plan-funding-se...
CalPers, the largest public employee retirement system in the US was not getting the kind of returns that they needed. They were restricted from purchasing stocks in certain industries, such as oil, weapons, etc.. However, they recently switched to investing in private equity funds and now they are getting much better returns, without all the pesky moral issues involved with it.
> However, they recently switched to investing in private equity funds and now they are getting much better returns
TFA says otherwise, in detail and with a lot of supporting data. If you're going to contradict it you ought to cite a source.
>they recently switched to investing in private equity funds
That's not recent at all. They've, for a long time, had large allocations to PE funds.
I would not be so sure they are getting better real returns. The mostly made up marks come out infrequently and seem to go down very slowly.
We won't know the return until the investment is over and capital is returned.
This kind of deceit is one of the main services PE funds provide
So is that basically a pensionwashing scheme?
Washing what, exactly? If you are suggesting that pension funds are investing via PE funds in assets that the pension funds themselves are prohibited from investing in, that's not how it works. The mandate between a pension fund and the PE fund will be quite clear on what assets the PE fund may or may not invest in on behalf of the pension fund, and will mirror the restrictions that apply to the pension fund.
Pretty much spot on.
> However, they recently switched to investing in private equity funds and now they are getting much better returns, without all the pesky moral issues involved with it.
Investors Warn of 'Rot in Private Equity' as Funds Strike Circular Deals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380751 - December 2025
Once Wall Street’s High Flyer, Private Equity Loses Its Luster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364566 - December 2025
Private Equity’s Latest Financial Alchemy Is Worrying Investors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891882 - August 2025
People Are Worried About Private Market Liquidity - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-06-10/peo... | https://archive.today/wJ3Uf - June 10th, 2025
Private Equity Fundraising Plunges Amid Struggle to Return Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-27/private-e... | https://archive.today/hxvzb - May 27th, 2025
Private Equity Firms Hunt for Alternate Ways to Return Investor Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-05-14/privat... | https://archive.today/6UzBk - May 14th, 2025
Unlocking a potential US$3.8 trillion opportunity for private equity firms - https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-s... - December 16th, 2024
Ah, a classic paperclip maximizer. Pension plans got the goal of multiplying the money so pensioners have more of it. Nobody bothered to mention that they should also make sure there's a world the pensioners can live in, so now that gets slowly sacrificed in the pursuit of the only explicitly stated goal
If multiplying money is the goal why does the article say they're doing a worse job of that than just buying index funds? If that claim is true, then clearly there are other issues at play than just that.
Pension funds have a different time horizon / cash flow needs than individual investors (namely, they need to meet their liabilities every month) and so are going to have a more conservative asset mix (read: lower expected returns w/ lower volatility) than your average S&P500 index funds.
For example, CaLPERS has ~45% of their assets under management in debt / real estate.
Is high volatility really such a concern when you're dealing with a large pool of funds over such a long timeframe? Sure, if you need to withdraw funds during a downturn that's bad, but over the long term isn't that statistically balanced out by other months where you get lucky and withdraw during a peak?
Longbets: “Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S&P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.” - https://longbets.org/362/ (won by Warren Buffett)
Should New York’s $270B pension fund abandon Wall Street? - https://www.semafor.com/article/08/07/2025/new-york-comptrol... - August 7th, 2025 ("Drew Warshaw is running for New York state comptroller, a job most voters would struggle to define but one that includes oversight of the state’s pension fund. If he unseats 18-year incumbent Thomas DiNapoli, Warshaw’s plan is to move much of its nearly $300 billion of investments into ultra-cheap, passive index funds. The New York State and Local Retirement System has more than $90 billion invested in private equity, private credit, real estate, and other complex assets. All promise high returns — catnip for pension managers facing future payouts to retirees — but charge high fees, too. The question facing New York and hundreds of other state and local pension funds, charitable endowments, universities, and government funds around the world: Are these high-priced managers worth the fees they’re charging?")
What Does Nevada’s $35 Billion Fund Manager Do All Day? Nothing - https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-does-nevadas-35-billion-fu... | https://archive.today/ywTFd - October 19th, 2016
The management fees are, broadly speaking, a grift/rake of capital flows and economically inefficient, based on the evidence and the data. The issue at play is that the capital market ecosystem has become a bureaucracy that demands to continue to grow, versus cannibalizing itself in the name of economically efficient capital allocation.
Tangentially, the markets are moving to more trading (24/7/5) versus less because when trades are made, money is made in a Parable of the Broken Window sort of way.
Yes, that's my point. That bet ended 8 years ago. If "multiplying money" is really the sole goal then why didn't all the pension funds switch to investing in index funds back then? There are clearly some structural issues here which don't align well with the idea that pensions are a "paperclip maximizer" with the goal of maximizing returns.
I find it interesting that the OP isn't arguing pensions should switch to investing in index funds, but rather into other projects the OP considers morally superior and that he personally believes will give better returns then hedge funds. To me that just feels like trading one set of hedge fund managers for another.
Isn't the main problem with pensions today the dramatic increase in life expectancy post-retirement? They were never intended to support decades of retirement: in the old days, you retired at 65 and there was a good chance you'd be dead by 70, at most 75. (When Social Security was established in the 1930s, life expectancy was only 61.) Nowadays, there's a good chance you'll live beyond 90, with expenses increasing disproportionately towards end-of-life. Combine that with a shrinking birthrate, and no feasible increase in ROI/worker contributions can sustain pension-funded retirements of 25+ years.
> Pension capital is money that will not be needed for 20 to 40 years.
Is it though? Much of the article talks about public employee pensions, and many of those are ridiculously underwater. People tend to think of pensions as deposit accounts that grow a bit while you wait to retire, but in reality many of them pay out a portion of your pension deposits directly to retirees, because the money those retirees deposited has already been spent.
Pension funds should have a rule -- invest in technologies, industries and companies that create a deflation (by technology, scale, efficiency, etc). This will create better outcomes for pensioners. If they invested in cheaper housing, healthcare, pensioners can live without the constant fear of running out of money. The absolute first thing to invest in is clean energy which can be super cheap to zero to actually making money by supplying power back to the grid. Once energy is solved, it solves an entire spectrum of problems.
Increasing the money(number), while making everything else costly (a lot more costlier in reality because of fictional inflation number) is not only hard to achieve, but even if achieved, doesn't mean much. ".S. Dollar itself has lost roughly 98% of its purchasing power over the long term" -- random Warren Buffett quote.
> Second, that capital is trapped in an institutional arrangement that charges enormous fees to match the performance of a simple index fund, while the money deployed through these intermediaries actively harms the communities pensioners live in: buying up their housing, closing their hospitals, bankrupting their local employers, gutting their newspapers.
This is the same argument that Ann Pettifor has about how the poor allocation of pension funds is because "it’s much easier to make money from gambling and speculating than it is from investing in the land on the one hand, in the broader sense of the word, or investing in labor"
https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/on-pensions-and-the-globa...
> student loan relief inflationary and unfair
The problem with US student loans is usury.
Student Loan interest rates in the US can be as high as 9-13%. The government can borrow at 3.36% which even if we assume a 20% overhead is 4.03% to the borrower. Other countries/governments do a scheme similar to this, and it makes repayment realistic.
I'm certain someone will respond telling me the difference between Subsidized, Unsubsidized, PLUS, and private loans which completely missing the point: There shouldn't be a private entity that needs to turn a profit on the backs of students begin with, it is immoral. If you remove the private for-profit entity, the loan-type distinction goes away.
It isn't uncommon to read stories from people, who graduated and are in good jobs, and had no gaps in repayments that are now on 300%+ of their original borrowed amount.
Your argument kinda falls apart with the observation that private loans often have waaaay lower interest rates than federal ones... Typical private loans start in the 3% range, vs 6.4 for the lowest Federal ones.
I do wonder when some unforeseen 2008 like crash someone crashes ETFs.
I can't really see how it would happen and that I suppose is part of the fun.
Most pension funds aren't heavily invested in ETFs (or other mutual funds). They're usually large enough that it makes sense to invest directly in the underlying securities.
Everyone has a prediction about what will cause the next major financial panic. Personally I think it will be triggered by property and casualty insurers who have purchased a lot of bonds where the credit ratings don't accurately reflect the true default risk. But who knows, it could be something else.
Unless we're just talking about regular embezzlement of funds, how do you crash an ETF? I'm talking about broad index funds. Not stuff like ARKK
> how do you crash an ETF? I'm talking about broad index funds. Not stuff like ARKK
Any ETF's share value can "crash" if there are not enough buyers to purchase shares when they are trading below NAV (net asset value). It's worth a quick google to see what "market makers" or "authorized participants" do, but the thing to keep in mind is: if the market is kind of exploding in some major ways (think 2008) an ETF might not have a lot of buyers, even if its market price is well below its net asset value.
It has happened many times throughout the 20th century. It requires mass fear so many people withdraw at the same time.
Pretty sure the first ETF was from around 1993, so I'm not sure how it is possible to happen "many times throughout the 20th century"
Index crashes have happened many times in the 20th and 21st centuries. The fact that index ETFs didn't exist for most of that period isn't relevant. If they had existed they would've crashed because they follow indices.
The point is that the ETF tracks its index, so what does it even mean to say ETF crash? Isn't that just the tracked stocks crashing? The ETF has little to do with it. But if there is some other risk that's warrants the ETF label, that's very very interesting and should be discussed! It would be little known or novel ETF mechanics.
> so what does it even mean to say ETF crash ? Isn't that just the tracked stocks crashing?
Yes. I've learned to differentiate between the words people use and what they actually mean, rather than being literal.
Since index ETFs make up a large portion of people's investments they fear the value of those ETFs tanking. Obviously this is due to the underlying stocks' prices dropping This has happened many times in the past, most (in)famously in 1929.
ETFs are a convenience tool for buying a bundle of assets. those assets exist independently. Other ways of owning bundles of assets existed before.
I invite you to watch Mike Green videos. In short, the current market rely on inflow of money to substain itself. P/E ratio can't increase forever. There will be a tipping point and if most of the money is invested based on an algorithm, it can unravel rapidly.
A US wealth/unrealized gains tax might trigger it, because it would likely create a cascade of forced selling, with the proceeds of sales getting burned as tax revenue for entitlement programs or debt payments rather than reinvested.
What if wealth taxes could be paid with shares instead of cash? And the shares went into a sovereign wealth fund? No forced selling, no crash.
What if the government owned all the corporations?
I don't know. You tell me.
I don't think that would happen for the same reason that there are income taxes and yet the government doesn't have every last dollar. Sovereign wealth funds sell assets too.
If you think sovereign wealth funds are communism, someone should tell Alaska.
The headline intimates that Vanguard, like other investment companies don't have large stakes in private equity firms... the same private equity firms bankrupting hospitals across the country.
I don't understand why we don't just ban private equity. Seems like zero value-add to the actual real economy.
Ban companies from owning other companies? How would that work exactly?
Private equity is a convenient whipping boy for ignorant, low-information HN users who don't understand the basics of how finance works. You can certainly find examples of destructive or unethical behavior if you dig deep enough. What you don't see in the news are all the cases where PE saved companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt.
> ignorant, low-information HN users who don't understand the basics of how finance works
I though HN was a site that welcomed people of all levels of knowledge and shared thoughts, ideas, and resources to help people learn so we can elevate each other. Why are you coming at someone who freely admitted they lack understanding and tossing out a dismissive reply to them instead of saying: "Let me help fill in the knowledge gap here."
I thought HN was a site where users would take 30 seconds to do a modicum of research before wasting everyone's time trying to score points with a lazy, low-effort comment.
Sure, people mostly call out private equity when you see a group trying to cobble together local monopoly power over some necessity of life just to extract more from everyone, or trying to financially optimize something by that was never financial before. There are of course many more benign examples that no one pays attention to. But the fact remains that there are PE firms doing massively harmful things to extract wealth.
> Private equity is a convenient whipping boy for ignorant, low-information HN users who don't understand the basics of how finance works. You can certainly find examples of destructive or unethical behavior if you dig deep enough. What you don't see in the news are all the cases where PE saved companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt.
This is an unnecessarily aggressive comment and not appropriate.
But also, your own comment is information-free. Why don’t you share actual examples and we can determine if those are significant enough to erase the anecdotal evidence from the other side. Virtually all examples of PE I’ve seen are extractive. They don’t result in a better product. They are instead just lazy arbitrage relying on the power of capital, vendor lock-in, switching costs, and the limited capital of their abused customers.
As for “how would that work exactly” - like anything else. We can come up wiht ways to classify companies as private equity and enact enormous taxes on them.
the PE business model depends on a lot of discretionary financial regulation.
For example, banks are given pretty generous capital rule treatment when they loan money to PE firms to increase leverage. We could stop that. They also get a lot of tax preferences that increase returns to investors and managers.
> You can certainly find examples of destructive or unethical behavior if you dig deep enough
Dig deep enough? Please. Merely tilt your head slightly upwards, and let your eyes feast on countless examples.
The problem here is that only bad/negative/failed cases make it to discussion.
It's like researching the safety of driving by only looking at local news station websites. It will seem like the only thing those cars do is crash and kill people.
And yet you didn't give one
You, presumably, have examples of these cases. Could you show them to us, please? (Given your understanding of the evidence available to us "ignorant, low-information HN users", you know you're making a bold claim, which creates a corresponding burden of proof.)
Example: almost every housing development.
Did you read TFA? There are some great examples there for the health care sector, and not just one off sensational examples.
When laypeople criticize private equity, what they almost always mean to refer to are leveraged buyouts. I suspect you’d acknowledge that, if a private equity firm sees a strategy to turn around a business operationally but doesn’t produce enough returns to service their debt, they won’t pursue it even though the original owner likely would have.
The rules are arbitrary, the rules can be changed at any time. Finance is simply a construct on top of lower level primitives (primarily the legal framework around property ownership and corporate entity law). Totally fine for folks to ask which rules matter, which don't, and which can be changed and how long it will take. Be curious!
If the President can sign EOs banning private equity/institutional ownership of homes [1], OP's ask does not seem to be that out there imho; again, all of these rules are arbitrary and can change at any time. How do we change rules around ownership? We change laws or how they're applied.
[1] Congressional housing deal faces new hurdle as Trump pushes investor ban - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/13/housing-deal-faces-... - February 13th, 2026
> What you don't see in the news are all the cases where PE saved companies that would have otherwise gone bankrupt.
Please provide citations of companies worth saving were saved by PE. I will start with the only one I know: Barnes & Noble.
I don't think a ban is required. Other countries (in the EU?) have put restrictions on it that prevent the abuses you see in the US. Why don't we do that? Because US Congress has been neutered and that appendage of US politics has withered and died.
Why don't you define private equity so we know what you're referring to
Banning people from owning business?
This is just a boogie man media term. There are good owners/investors and bad.
Private Equity doesn’t “own” business in the sense most people understand it.
PE is finalisation of business, its ownership is far more similar to a mortgagee than an owner in every sense of the word.
Because the thing you want to ban isn't well-defined.
But do you agree that there are a set of bad actors who fall under the (not well-defined) term of "private equity"?
Is this a definitional quibble or do you not believe there is a problem?
I accept there's a problem. I don't believe there's a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. It'll take years, possibly decades, of regulatory and anti-trust work across every industry. Tons of political will and capital.
It'd be difficult to ban what we commonly describe as private equity (a.k.a. PE firms) without banning the private (a.k.a. random people) from being able to hold equity. Someone smart might be able to ban the kind of investment vehicles that have become the bane of modern productivity but we do still need some mechanism to allow investment.
Well, let's start with banning debt push down and then move on to the next tool used to privatise profit and socialise risks. You know, it used to be that unfair business practices were researched and banned, simple as that. Just throwing up your hands and saying "Well, what to do?" when there's, you know, a whole science in which people are trained, is disingenuous.
Private equity is capitalism. That's the capitalism part of the economy.
Im gonna speculate they were referring to the part of private equity where you buy businesses to load them up with debt to buy more businesses ad nauseum
You can't load someone else with debt. That's obviously illegal. When you buy a company it isn't "them" anymore. And the new owners have exactly the same rights to borrow money as the old ones.
That's true when the debt is taken it is taken by the company (at the direction of the acquiring firm)... and maybe the bigger issue is that banks should be a whole lot more judicious in extending that debt. But some firms have found a heck of a loophole in buying a company, running an extremely high debt line, paying the acquiring firm (themselves) handsomely and then innocently whistling when the business collapses and a bunch of real economic value is erased.
Doing that to a company isn't an activity that should be rewarded since you're destroying, rather than creating, economic value. It is absolutely an exploit or flaw in our system and no more than one person should have been able to get away with it.
I have no idea why leveraged buyouts are legal. What a bizarre mechanism for acquisition that feels so easy to just shut down with a relatively simple rule.
Restricting a previously purchased business from taking out debt feels harder to regulate, but someone smart could probably figure out a few good rules to stop the majority of abuses.
That's called a leveraged buyout and isn't restricted to private equity.