I recently flagged a post by Patrick McKenzie on the mechanics of the humble bank deposit. Patrick has followed that with another equally interesting discussion of deposit insurance. The post is written as a high level primer and so it does not offer any insights to anyone already familiar with the topic.
The main thing that grabbed my attention was Patrick’s emphasis on the “information insensitive” nature of bank deposits. This to my mind is a fundamental concept in analysing bank deposits but gets way less attention that I think it deserves. It is particularly important when you are looking at the question of the extent to which deposit insurance promotes moral hazard.
So it was good to see someone else promoting the importance of this concept. On the other hand, his discussion of the information insensitivity of deposits does not give as much attention to the role of “deposit preference” as I think it deserves. It is always possible of course that I have this wrong but, for me at least, the preferred claim that many jurisdictions afford bank deposits is a key part of understanding why bank deposits can be information insensitive” without necessarily creating moral hazard.
If you are interested to dig deeper ….
- Matt Levine did a good post on the overall question of how finance uses tranching to turn a pool of risky assets into a mix of safe and risky claims on those assets where he described this as “A main move in finance” (see here for my summary of the column if you don’t have access to his column)
- There is also a page on my website where I discuss the arguments for protecting depositors (the “why”), another where I attempt to dig a bit deeper into the technical aspects of bank deposit protection (the “how”), and this post offering an Australian perspective on the process of how bank deposits (a loan to highly leveraged company) get turned into mostly risk free assets in the hands of bank depositors.
Tony – From the Outside
From the outside 