News & Comments

Last year, I savored a bit of schadenfreude watching my con law scholar colleagues despair about their field after cases like Dobbs v. Women's Health Organization or West Virginia v. EPA. Con law scholars see themselves as the royalty of the legal academy, far above those folks who do blue collar law like bankruptcy and commercial law or grubby stuff like banking and money.

There's talk about removing the FDIC deposit insurance caps in response to the "Panic of 2023"®.  There's a refreshing realism about such a move. But let's also be clear about the distributional impact of such a move:  it's a huge cross-subsidy from average Joes to wealthy individuals and businesses.>

When President Biden announced the rescue of Silicon Valley Bank depositors, he emphasized that "investors in the banks will not be protected.  They knowingly took a risk and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money.  That’s how capitalism works." Unfortunately, that's not how US law works. 

Following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, a lot of other regionals have experienced depositor runs and serious pressure on their stock prices. But there's actually a lot of variation among regionals, and the solutions to SVB's problems don't necessarily fit the other regionals' problems, as the case of First Republic Bank shows.