Section III Extra Credit Posts for Spring 2023
For March 10 Holy crap (yes, that's the technical term for it). There's been a bank run ... right at the time I'm covering bank runs in class. This is a still developing story, so expect more posts about this. In fact, many news sites are running live updates on the topic, which some of you may enjoy following. On Friday, SVB, the 18th largest bank in the country was shut down after being driven into bankruptcy by mass withdrawals. Digression: international students will be shocked to learn, and domestic students should learn, that the U.S. has a highly decentralized banking system, composed of thousands of small banks. In fact, "big" American banks are often quite small compared to those in many other countries. This is probably a good thing: it helps spread out risk. Anyway, problems with SVB apparently started appearing early last week (I missed it too). By Thursday, there were mass withdrawals, and on Friday the state of California shut them down, and handed