I'd put Banks in the Asimov/Stephenson tier at best. His ideas were brilliant enough to sustain a long series - but not one book in it actually makes for a good read. Neal Asher doesn't have anything like the same ambition, but Hilldiggers is a better Culture novel than any of the actual Culture novels if you actually want to read and enjoy it.
I am glad someone else has the same view point: Asimov and Stephenson are great hard sci-fi, but they can't write characters. Except Stephenson COULD, and did in Snow Crash and Diamong Age to some degree, but then stopped being interested in it. While VV had good characters in his books, even though I would argue he wasn't "excellent" at it either, and maybe Stephenson even surpassed VV in characters/story in Snow Crash.
I can't really judge Asimov - so many people stole from him that he just reads like War & Peace to me in the sense that it was probably awesome and novel at some point, but at this point it's just a little stale, even though Foundation was still cool...at least the first few books.
With that said, I don't put VV above Stephenson. Maybe above Gibson because I really appreciate the technical details, but not quite sure. To me VV, Stephenson, and Gibson are all the absolute top tier, at least in the sci fi realm. No one even comes close, as cool as some one offs by other authors, like Forever War, are.
I've so far only read Consider Phlebas, and while it's an interesting dystopia where humans have no purpose, and machines could do everything (if allowed), it's not an actual interesting story.
It's like he had the idea for the dystopia, with the main character fighting against the machines. And then tried to write a story around it. The central idea is interesting I guess, but the story built around it is not.
It doesn't help that the fight is futile, the machines as described are so powerful humanity doesn't stand a chance, so what kind of story can you make?
it's an interesting dystopia where humans have no purpose
Unfortunately every single one of his books has this problem. It's like all of his novels are written from the perspective of the protagonist's housecat.
yep. Due to the SVB failure, large banks are now backstopped by a guarantee that they can loan from the FED at 100% of the value of the bonds at redemption time (even though they're worth less right now, due to rates hiking).
That would have been enough to save SVB, if it had already been in force at the time.
see: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...
It could save a bank from an immediate liquidity disaster. But it’s not a guaranteed long or even medium term solution.
Imagine, in an extreme case, a bank with $1 billion par value of treasury bonds, with mark to market value of $800M. And $1 billion of customer deposits. And that’s it. (Obviously this is unrealistic.). Now the customers flee. The bank borrows against its $1bn of bonds and pays off the customers. The bank now has no customers, $1bn (par) of bonds, and $1bn of short-term debt to the Fed. They can roll that debt over forever, but they need to pay interest, and, when you imagine that $1bn (par!) of bonds as being worth $1bn, that’s only if they are held, earning essentially no interest, to maturity.
So the bank has no income and is obligated to pay interest to the Fed until the bonds mature, and they can’t. Not can they sell the bonds because they will take a loss and be unable to roll over the loan. In other words, they’d be insolvent. They’re in the hole by $200M of present value, and they need assets or an income stream to back that up.
The normal business of banking can provide that income stream. For example, sufficiently lazy customers will deposit funds at less than market interest, and the bank can earn the difference.
Current wisdom was that higher interest rates would be good for a bank (after all, deposits are sticky). That didn't turn out to be the case for SVB (high concentration of risk, ...) but is more true for a more diversified bank, especially with a lifeline like the BTFP.
More importantly, the actions of the FED after SVB signaled they'll do whatever it takes to keep the system stable.
If a single bank was getting close to your hypothetical scenario, you'd probably see a forced merger. If the majority was at risk, you'd probably see actions to ensure higher margins (such as using reg Q to impose maximum rates on deposits)
In general, higher interest seems good for banks. But I do wonder to what extent high interest rates encourage depositors to move money out of the banking system entirely. Right now, there is no particular limit on the ability of depositors to use those deposits to purchase short-dated T-bills or their money-market equivalents — there’s plenty of T-bill liquidity to go around. (Presumably this results in the banks, on average, holding an equivalent amount less of various agency debt.)
Not doing something along these lines is fairly expensive right now.
