Kinsler: I wonder if Morgan Guaranty Trust has a Christmas Club
There was a run on the Silicon Valley Bank a few days ago. Neither you nor I had an account there, but the incident has completely absorbed the attention of economists and finance theorists everywhere. They can speak of nothing else.
But perhaps you don’t happen to live with a financial theorist, a vertically-challenged person who stands in front of the stove cooking Italian delicacies and explains that a ‘bank run’ is not a charity event sponsored by The Friendly Bremen but is instead a serious financial incident in which too many of a bank’s depositors try to withdraw all their savings at once.
Now, perhaps the last bank run you recall was one involving the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank of London and two child depositors, Jane and Michael Banks. (Sound familiar? It was in Walt Disney’s 1964 movie “Mary Poppins.”) I think there was another that negatively affected Jimmy Stewart until his rescue by the Angel Clarence.
All of which is to say that we don’t see many bank runs these days. (I always liked those in which people crowd in front of the bank, waving their bankbooks. Again, only in old movies.)
But apparently the Silicon Valley Bank (I shall refrain from implant jokes because I have to live with Natalie) was a rather large one, and in California. Maybe they gave away Tesla cars instead of toasters. When the news appeared today Natalie began dashing back and forth between her smartphone and her computer, for the detailed financial news she watches can be clearly read only on the larger machine.
She must have seen something unpleasant among her phone’s Bloomberg bulletins tonight at supper because when I looked across the table where she should have been, there was nothing but a theoretical cloud of dust to mark her rapid exit. So I took the rest of her dinner into our office (you do not want to be caught near a hungry finance professor) so she wouldn’t starve, when we rounded the corner simultaneously.
No collision resulted, and as she finally ate she told me that, whew, the stock market had gone up. Hooray, I suppose. While we have a certain amount of our savings invested, it’s all in truly exciting instruments like the Sioux City Water Plant Improvements Municipal Bond Fund. Thus I don’t watch the Dow Jones Industrial Average and never truly understood it to begin with.
But I live very close to someone who does understand, and with considerable passion. So if the Treasury bond yield curve once again finds itself upside-down, or another bank fails, our friends (and I) will have a short person to reassure them.
Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, lives in a household that is financially aware due to Natalie’s knowledge. And he himself is a cheapskate. The two resident cats, both Lancaster natives, reportedly have large, extended families and their own trust funds.
This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Kinsler: I wonder if Morgan Guaranty Trust has a Christmas Club
