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đề xuất người gửi tiền được bảo hiểm toàn bộ tiền gửi, không giới hạn...

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Last year, Marc Lasry, the owner (chủ sở hữu) of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, revealed that its star player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, at one time had been putting his money in 50 banks, with no single account holding more than $250,000. Why? Because Antetokounmpo wanted every cent to be insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And $250,000 is the cap on insured deposits.

What Antetokounmpo apparently didn’t realize — but was driven home with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week — is that the deposit insurance cap’s days are over. True, the law says there’s a limit, and the government has to invoke a “systemic risk exception” to back uninsured deposits. But when a bank is on the verge (trên bờ vực) of failing, the specter (bóng ma) of systemic risk (rủi ro hệ thống) always exists.

“Ever since the S.&L. crisis in the 1980s, everyone gets rescued,” said Karen Petrou, a co-founder of Federal Financial Analytics, referring to depositors.

Robert Hockett, a financial regulation expert at Cornell University, believes it’s time to make the overarching guarantee explicit. And he’s not alone: Within the next few days, Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, is expected to introduce a bill that proposes raising or removing the F.D.I.C.’s coverage cap.

Hockett and others argue that insuring all deposits could improve the banking system. They say it wouldn’t introduce moral hazard (rủi ro đạo đức), because putting deposits at risk is not what keeps banks in check. Instead, what’s supposed to keep bankers from acting too recklessly is the knowledge that if their bank fails, shareholders and bondholders will be wiped out, executives will be investigated and, in many cases, the government will try to claw back compensation.

Deposit insurance has long been funded by the banks themselves. Since 2005, their contributions have been “risk-priced,” meaning the more risk a bank takes, the higher the premiums it pays. Larger banks pay more than smaller banks. Hockett’s scheme would obviously require larger contributions — and tighter regulations — but he envisions a similar tiered system. He also envisions a return of measures like stress tests, which Congress eliminated for midsize banks during the Trump administration.

Explicitly insuring all deposits, Hockett says, could prevent a run on a troubled bank, because customers would know ahead of time that their money was safe. It could also help preserve small and midsize banks. Although SVB plainly mismanaged its risk, the bank catered to a sector it understood well: venture capitalists and start-ups. Its loan portfolio was not the problem. Other smaller banks also specialize in particular sectors and are willing to make loans that the big behemoths might not be. That needs to be encouraged, Mr. Hockett says.

Not everyone thinks deposits should be free of risk. Sheila Bair, who was the chair of the F.D.I.C. during the financial crisis, practically groaned when I brought up the idea of insuring all deposits.

These were big tech companies like Roku whining and crying about their uninsured deposits,” she said. “If a $200 billion bank can bring down the banking system, then we don’t have a stable, resilient system.”

Bair went on to say that she thinks the banking system is “mostly resilient” and that the real problem was that the regulators didn’t communicate well enough to the public that the crisis was limited to a small group of banks.

Still, Hockett’s idea has some lawmakers on board. We’ll see if it flies.

Bài trước: Chơi dại