美国国家公共电台 NPR--Of bank runs & animal spirits: the force inside us that keeps regulators up at night（在线收听）

Of bank runs & animal spirits: the force inside us that keeps regulators up at night

Transcript

In the last few weeks, we've seen something we hadn't seen in decades: bank runs. A look at what causes them and why it worries economists (and bankers) so much

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The International Monetary Fund released its economic forecast for this year, and it was a little bleak. The IMF predicts very slow growth for most countries. Here in the U.S., one of the big things holding the economy back? Volatility in the banking sector - in other words, the bank runs we saw last month. But what exactly causes a bank run? Here's NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith.

STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: A few weeks ago, Ben Sand was at his home in Sydney, Australia, when he got a bad feeling. Sand is the CEO of Strong Compute, a medical imaging startup. His company kept its money at Silicon Valley Bank. He'd been reading about the bank's struggles, but he wasn't that worried.

BEN SAND: I was thinking, oh, it's SVB. Like, you know, how bad can it be?

VANEK SMITH: The decades-old multibillion-dollar bank had always been great to work with, but then a few things happened.

SAND: Suddenly, sort of everything stopped working. International wires were not available. Exactly how to move money was not clear. We'd heard stories of people sending wires to other bank accounts and those bank accounts rejecting those wires, but their SVB account showing the wires had gone through, and the money was somewhere.

VANEK SMITH: Sand called his team.

SAND: We, you know, rather quickly made that assessment that it looked quite bad, and so we took action.

VANEK SMITH: Took action, as in got on a plane that night and flew from Sydney to San Francisco, a 19-hour trip, then immediately jumped into a car and drove straight to Silicon Valley Bank's headquarters in Santa Clara.

SAND: And then we went and waited outside the bank.

VANEK SMITH: What time did you get to the bank?

SAND: Two in the morning.

VANEK SMITH: Other people showed up. A big line formed of worried-looking customers anxious to pull their money out. Sand says he does not panic easily, but almost all of his company's money was in that bank, including its operating budget, payroll.

SAND: You start sort of doing a lot of math in your head.

VANEK SMITH: As dawn broke, official-looking people showed up. They were from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - government regulators that insure banks. They told the crowd there was nothing to worry about. Their money was safe. And they handed out snacks.

SAND: The FDIC came out and gave us doughnuts, and I said, should I read anything into the shape of this doughnut and what's happening with our money? (Laughter).

VANEK SMITH: That feeling in the pit of your stomach that something is wrong, that moves you to book a flight to another country or stand in line all night, we might call it a gut feeling or Spidey sense or blind panic. Economists call it animal spirits.

BEN HO: Emotions that cause people to sort of suddenly shift from one pattern of behavior to another pattern of behavior.

VANEK SMITH: Ben Ho is an economist at Vassar. He's author of the book "Why Trust Matters." He says animal spirits are the emotions that override rational thought and cause people to behave in unpredictable, often extreme, ways. Ho says animal spirits are released when trust is broken - in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, the trust that underpins our banking system, our entire economy.

HO: I think of human history as, like, thousands of years of how we've learned to trust each other in ever-greater ways.

VANEK SMITH: Ho says that ability to trust institutions, markets, banks, it's made us all infinitely wealthier. It has vastly increased our quality of life. But when that trust fails, animal spirits take over. Like in March of 2020, when investors sold off massive amounts of stock and markets lost a third of their value in one month, that was animal spirits. People getting into frantic multimillion-dollar bidding wars over NFTs when they weren't even sure what they were, that was animal spirits. People panic-buying armfuls of toilet paper - animal spirits.

HO: What we don't know is what causes that switch to flip.

VANEK SMITH: After waiting outside of Silicon Valley Bank all night, Ben Sand finally got in front of a teller and managed to get a cashier's check for almost the entire amount in his account. But his faith was deeply shaken at that point. Everything seemed suspect.

SAND: The question here of what is a cashier's check? Is it actually cash? That's what people say. But like, no, this thing is literally money. I feel like I could have printed this on my own printer. Like, well, is a check instructions to move money or is it the actual money?

VANEK SMITH: Sands (ph) eventually got that money into a larger bank that seemed safer.

SAND: I think everyone's got their antennas up for exactly what's happening with the global banking system and how this is all going to turn out.

VANEK SMITH: Across the U.S., people have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars out of small banks in just the last few weeks. Economist Ben Ho says this is why governments have been so quick to bail out faltering banks. They're trying to calm the animal spirits. And it has worked. Of course, that could change. It's estimated nearly 200 U.S. banks are financially vulnerable right now.

Stacey Vanek Smith, NPR News.