title: How deposit insurance actually works
author: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
contenttype: podcast
publication: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
published: 2025-11-06T07:07:28
sourceurl: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/prfx.byspotify.com/e/media.transistor.fm/27e76823/a85b80c8.mp3
word_count: 5979
Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does. Hi, do you have everybody? My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio 11 on the Internet. Money is a minor miracle, and I think it is broadly underappreciated that it is backed by a constellation of systems and societal infrastructure, which makes it as reliable as it is in our daily lives, including during periods of financial uncertainty when the stock market is down or when there is indeed a banking crisis. One of those important bits of infrastructure is deposit insurance, and I think it is broadly misunderstood by people. It's a special province only of people who deal with banking regulation for a living, which sensibly is almost no one, unless you are visiting the Bank of England or the Central Bank. And it is poorly understood even by people who work professionally in, for example, financial technology. So I once wrote an essay called Deposit Insurance Under the Coverage in July 15th, 2022, which went into a bit of detail about how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FTIC, conducts deposit insurance in the United States. It is something of an evergreen topic, and indeed it was quite useful for explaining how FTIC insurance kicked in and was modified in 2023 when the miniature banking crisis hit the United States original banks. But fortunately, and unfortunately, I expect that at some point over the next few years, we will also be reflecting on how effective deposit insurance is as an institution. And so to have a link ready for those unhappy days where we are saved from the break by an insurance policy thought I would read this essay for you. I also have some post writing commentary on it, because obviously with this written in 2022, we have the recent experience of a banking crisis, and we can talk about how particular bits held up or didn't hold up during that banking crisis. And with that, the essay. When we discussed deposits as a financial product, a hand-waved-away explanation of an important bit of financial technology which makes them work, deposit insurance schemes. Along with the broader constellation of bank regulation, they formed the public part of a public private partnership that makes deposits money good, and therefore undergirds every transaction in the banking system and most of the wider economy. This issue will be more US-centric than I like, mostly because I understand the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FTIC, which runs the US deposit insurance scheme far better than any similar government agency. In broad outlines, I'd expect Japan, the UK, European Union countries, and similar to have similar mechanics, but I can't impede any intelligently on them without doing more reading. I'm going to talk fairly confidently about the fintech industry in a moment, and will repeat my usual disclaimer. I will now edit the usual disclaimer because, oh, I no longer work at Strap, but I'm still an advisor there. Opinions in the space are my own, and they were not run past, for example, a lawyer for an accuracy check, but this is the thing that I'm pretty decent at. The covered peril. Every insurance policy has a notion of covered perils, it will pay out if and only if an event matching a limited description occurs. Deposit insurance covers precisely one covered peril, a loss to depositors caused by the failure of an insured financial institution. Those are three prongs to the test, and they are each independently important. From this, you can deduce a lot of things which are not covered perils. Did you lose money on a bank issued bond or equity, not covered, your higher rate of return was specifically to compensate you for the risk you were taking. The capital structure of banks is designed to protect depositors from risks to the banks' fraud rate, enterprise. Thank you for your service that is indeed the sacred duty of bank shareholders to take the loss before depositors do. Did your bank screw up on a given transaction with you in such a way that you lost money, but the bank is still open for business, not covered, your recourse is with the bank, a three regulators or with the legal system, but the FDIC will not pay out your claim. Did a business which has an account at an FDIC insured institution, but is not itself an FDIC insured institution fail, not covered. If their bank is still open for business, your princess isn't another castle, and you'll very likely have to follow a bankruptcy proceeding with interest. As an aside, the FDIC sent a number of letters out in 2022, post the writing of this essay and in 2023, demanding that various firms stopped referring to their products as FDIC insured because they felt that would mislead customers. One of the firms that got such a letter was FTX. FTX claimed at one point that their customers deposits were held at an FDIC insured banking institution, and therefore in the event of failure at FTX, their customers would be made whole. Well, guess what? FTX didn't defail. And the FDIC, I'm sorry, $0.00 and 0 cents of those losses because in the instant case, the firms that FTX bank debt did not fail. Now granted, those firms did fail later down the line, but the massive misappropriation of money from the depositors of FTX was not covered by FDIC insurance, even then, because those firms either wound down in an orderly fashion in the case of Silvergate where no depositors took losses or they were backstabbed by a special program that we put in place in the wake of the 2023 debacle. This third prong is a bit of a sticking point for financial technology firms, which experienced the dilemma in building products that mimicked some features of deposits. On the one hand, they want to message those products to the market as secure. On the other hand, they typically need to keep customers money in the banking system, generally at an FDIC insured institution. But they are not themselves, FDIC insured institutions. A thing with some app marketing teams will say is that deposits are secure up to the applicable limits, which may malify customers, but may not answer the question they truly have. The thing that is often mumbled in these situations is that the customer's money is insured against the failure of the underlying bank, whose risk of failure is known to be very remote, but not insured against the failure of the technology platform, whose risk of failure is almost always orders a magnitude larger than that of the bank. This is a heavily fax in circumstances dependent detail, and even Fintech product teams and lawyers often fail to understand the nuance difference in mechanics between various implementation options for deposit adjacent products, which when exposed to various tail risk events. Regardless of those differences, which could fill volumes and occupy many billable bankruptcy attorney hours, you can round this to the FDIC does not insure against the primary sources of risk to users of Fintech products. Anatomy of a bank failure. But let's talk about what deposit insurance does do. Bank failures are auto-catalyzing processes, similar to meltdowns of nuclear reactors. Deposit insurance is designed to make failures less likely and limit the damage caused by them through a variety of technical means. You could analogize it to some combination of monitoring staff, control routes, and technical measures for deploying them, and a cleanup crew. Most failures happen slowly and then quickly. Most banking crises happen sporadically around the periphery of a banking system, and then suddenly everywhere all at once. Deposit insurance is designed to limit and contain the damage on the individual bank level, to minimize the chances of failures cascading in a systemic fashion. Making depositors whole is both the necessary prerequisite of this and, to a degree, a happy side effect of that core function. The thing which happens slowly to banks is making bad loans. This takes a substantial amount of work, generally spanning many people's efforts over years. Lots of smart people have to go to work every day, produce a lot of paper, and bend all of their professional efforts to the task for bank to end up with a pile of bad loans. I'll say in the context of the 2023 banking crisis, the underlying issue was not bad loans so much as bad loans and bonds where the bad was not credit quality. It was simply that the loans and bonds were purchased in a very low interest rate environment. We moved into a high interest rate environment, and then banks ran into a great deal of interest rate risk, which they had mismanaged, and also from the side of the folks that set the interest rates where they did not heed the warnings from the FTIC that cranking rates as quickly as they were cranking would cause large losses in the banking sector. Indeed, reading those FTIC reports on a quarterly basis up to the 2023 banking crisis makes for some excellent salaryman skills in trying to read the FTIC blinking at the Federal Reserve. If you keep doing this, this will crash the banks, and the Federal Reserve saying, but we've got to keep doing it because we've got to get inflation under control. Decisions were made. That bit about working hard to produce a bunch of bad loans sounds like a joke, but it isn't one. A good portion of banking regulation is making it hard to do things that blow up banks. This is why banks don't routinely have, for example, 25% of their loan but concentrated in loans to a single over leverage hedge fund. A pattern that the crypto industry has recently discovered is riskiness up. I give three links to this in the essay. I'll note, as an aside, it turned out that concentration risk was a major, major issue. And concentration risks specifically concentrated in the crypto industry. With regards to the orderly wind down or silver gates and then the collapse of SBB and signature bank. Recall that deposits are liabilities which allow the bank to leverage up their capital to purchase or manufacture assets, which will overwhelmingly be loans. Many things can make a loan bad. The most obvious one to non-specialists is a bismondly poor credit quality. A loan which was doomed to never be repaid is obviously a bad loan. Very few loans are bad in this fashion. The more likely failures of underwriting loans are pricing credit quality poorly. For example, not earning enough interest to cover the risks associated with the loan and poor portfolio construction. The first was a major contribution caused to the global financial crisis. For complicated reasons, the United States, the combination of policy and market forces, ended up in a situation where the financial industry greatly mispriced risks and so clothed, subprime home loans, and overproduced them relative to true market demand for those assets, and relatedly for the homes. Most discourses about the financial crisis miss that the malinvestment is not just improper operation of a spreadsheet, but in bending the productive resources of the nation to build particular fiscal and stanchions of homes, using bricks and concrete and labor and similar in particular places, such that no buyer actually existed for the home near the price the home was believed to command. I'll note as an aside in the intervening at almost 20 years now since the financial crisis, many of those homes would have now been consumable by the market at the prices, which they were believed to carry in 2008 due to the combination of America getting wealthier over the intervening 20 years, and in our frankly scandalous underinvestment in building homes in the last 20 years. However, being off by 15 years on timing is indistinguishable from being wrong in capital markets. Anyhow, back to failing banks. Suppose you've made some bad loans, a process which took you years. Suppose you've actually lost money on some of these loans, which is not co-extensive with making a bad loan. You can lose money on good loans, and frequently will. You can have bad loans which are for the moment paying as agreed. As an aside, there are very many loans made to the commercial real estate industry right now, which have not defaulted yet, but which the companies and banks that made the loans are extremely wish that they could unroll, and which they can't unroll because reasons outside the scope of the side talk. You can, through either ill will or desire to provide your valued customers with the experience that keeps bringing them back. Paper over those losses by, for example, lending commercial real estate operators more money for new projects, with them using some of it to make payments on their old loans. This is one of the most dangerous auto-canonizing processes for bank failure. The hole is getting deeper by a mechanism that prevents you from seeing that there is any hole. As an aside, in commercial real estate, this is often called Extend and Pretend. You extend new loans to cover the old loans and pretend that there is some economic value somewhere in the economy which will eventually make you a hole for those old loans. In principle, bad loans are enough to cause bank failure. In practice, there is almost always a catalyst, and that catalyst is almost always liquidity crunch. Keeping your bank hydrated. Banks need to be liquid, to have assets which could be easily converted into money at very close to the value that they are marked as having for day-to-day operations. Partly, this is to, for example, make payroll and pay vendors, but overwhelmingly it is necessary to service depositors. Predicting depositors' demands for liquidity is one of the core boring challenges of banking. It isn't anything close to constant over time. Tends to surge around payday, for example, and holidays, and during periods of broad financial stress. Some would counter into a defleap bank's often become more liquid during crises. As, for example, depositors sell financial assets and move cash into the bank. Or as, for example, a community bank which recently saw its community hit by wildfires, disinsurance payouts, move billions of dollars of settlements into the bank, one account at a time. What happens when a bank is not as liquid as it predicts it needs to be? It sells assets, and generally the best assets go first. A bank with marketable treasury securities, debts of the US government, for example, can find a willing buyer for them with virtually no slippage at basically any time. A bank might have some bonds of publicly traded companies, and perhaps it would take more of a loss selling those, but in most market conditions those sales can be done quickly. Run out of things which you can push about into sell? Well, you still have options. You'll look at your loan book and start with, for example, high-quality residential mortgages which are conforming. There is almost always a buyer for that product, and it can be done relatively efficiently, but not as efficiently as treasuries or marketable securities. Then you'll start looking at your non-conforming mortgages and commercial loan book, and around here is where you start running into trouble. As an aside, if you want to read a concrete instantiation of the difficulty and make a commercial loan book liquid on a very short time frame, you can read the after-action report for the closure of signature bank. Signature bank have a large practice in New York City commercial real estate, and signature bank had the misapprehension bordering on delusion that they could take their commercial loan book to the federal reserve, or other sources of emergency liquidity over the course of the weekend where the bank was failing, and get that commercial loan book underwritten over the course of a weekend so that the source of liquidity could loan them money against the value of their commercial loan book less some haircut such that they would be able to meet the billions upon billions of dollars that their depositors were asking to get wired out on Monday morning. That was a delusion that was never going to happen. The crypto community of as I've discussed in the piece, debanking and debunking has chosen to believe what signature sets about their decision making process over that weekend, and Senator former Senator believe Barney Frank, who is a board member of signature. There's also a state-to-significant portion of his cred on we believe that we were sufficiently liquid and management of its productions for being sufficiently liquid presupposed that there was magically available liquidity over the weekend for those commercial loan books, and I'm sorry, banking just doesn't work that way as they found out when the excrement hit the assilating blade. See, your bank is heavily intertwined in the micro economy it operates in, as are all of your counterparties. If your bank is under stress, it is overwhelmingly likely to be a community bank. That says this generalizes to basically all sizes of banks. I will say as an aside, strictly speaking, this is true, there are more community banks that fall into stress than other banks that fall into stress, but obviously with the experience of 2023, the stress was concentrated in large regionals for various reasons. Your loan books are likely to be very correlated, basically every effective process to grow loans introduces more correlation. You cite your branches in places where you think they will get attractive business spot to them, and your loan book starts to concentrate in those neighborhoods. You hire loan officers who are good at getting deals done, and your loan book concentrates in the professional networks of those loan officers of whom you probably have less than a few dozen. You provide excellent service to your customers, and they refer their friends, and their friends tend to be from the same industry with the same rough credit profiles, doing business in the same areas. When you attempt to sell concentrated packages of risk, the buyer, who is likewise a savvy financial institution, will do two things. One, they will want to discount what you think the package is worth. Both to make it worth their while, to absorb the friction of the deal, not to compensate them for a correlated risk. Two, they will blabbed to everyone they know that you are shopping blocks of your book. As an aside, this was extremely a problem in 2023 when the banks attempted to either sell portions of their assets or raise capital. The fact of raising capital is a sign of weakness, and no matter how many times that you say to the market, we are only raising capital because we don't need to raise capital. The market has long since invited the words of Thailand Lannister here. No one who says they don't need to raise capital does not need to raise capital. In particular, many of your loans are to commercial real estate developers and operators. Here it is useful to understand that CRA professionals are the most indiscreet industry on God's Green Earth. The industry runs on secrets and alcohol, and both are exchanged to lubricate relationships. Some enterprising bartender should mix a cocktail and brand it, non-disclosure agreement, it would sell swimming pools. Commercial real estate players are local rich people and pillar members of the community. Birds of a feather flock together, and CRA players talk to people much like themselves. At the bar, on the golf course, at church, at barbecues, etc. It is literally their business to talk to most of your deposit base. And the thing they will say will be that your institution is undergoing stress, and that the first people to withdraw that deposits will get 100% of their money. But that later depositors attempting to withdraw might not. And then you end with the bank run. The most dangerous auto-catalizing part of bank failures, where your depositors race to get their money out. In most cases, if you're killed by a bank run, the damage was done long before. You earned your fate via years of diligent work making bad loans, and became insolvent. The bank run revealed the insolvency. As an aside, in 2023, the insolvency was known prior to the bank run, but only became really common knowledge among the depositor base of, say, SVB. In the week of the bank run. And that was one of the reasons why it was the fastest bank run in history. It had been acted upon by various hedge funds and reported by the financial times, I think. But earn hope is often given credit for his essay and the diff, which brought it the attention of people who were more central to the community of practice that was the SVB's depositor base. Then the financial times was failing bankers often don't agree with this. I think that, for example, the liquidity constraint caused by the bank run made them need to sell off assets that had discounted their true value. If they had realized the true value of assets, if people had just been patient, they argue the bank would have survived. I think the acknowledgement of an ad read sounds cooler in Japanese. Let me tell you a scary story. You work in marketing and are all set for the new campaign. Leadership to love the wireframes design produced in their usual tool chain, and everyone is plus one for launch. Except your customers can't actually click on a wireframe. Engineering told you that no one ever gets promoted to staff engineer for just, quote, making websites, end quote. And it's not quite what design envisioned. We've all been there, unless you use Framer, a sponsor of today's episode. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites, and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of design pages, a free canvas based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all-in-one design platform, from social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ITS go live, start to finish. Framer is a free, full-feature design tool, think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators, and all the essentials, vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes. Everything you need to design, totally free. Ready to design, iterate, and publish all-in-one tool. Start creating for free at framer.com slash design, and use code complex systems for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com slash design, promo code complex systems, all one word, all capital letters. Rules and restrictions may apply. Back to deposit insurance. Posit insurance schemes include what game theorists would call a commitment strategy. One way to maintain trust is the messy and complicated business of building it over time. In a bank run, that trust, carefully cultivated over years, can evaporate in a matter of hours. One way to maintain trust is to say, an algorithm, administered by someone much bigger than any of us, who has much less emotional skin in this game. It's going to absolutely steamroll all the facts of this particular situation, and do exactly what it is designed to do. The FDIC's algorithm in simplified form is, if an insured financial institution fails, we will make absolutely positively sure that each depositor gets their deposits back, up to a limit of $250,000. The actual recovery formula is substantially more complicated. That coverage limit is per cop type, a nuance that only financial planners could love. The definition of a depositor is exactly specified down to what happens when people share ownership of accounts. What the FDIC tries to do is to make information sensitive. This particular bank is failing. The deposits, again, information insensitive to most depositors. Don't worry, the US federal government is good for more money than you've ever had. Don't feel the need to come to the bank on Monday unless you otherwise would have, in which case the money will absolutely be there. Businesses, which frequently have more than $250,000 to their names, have treasury management practices to limit counterparty exposure, including to banks. We'll discuss those in depth some of their time. This is also available to individuals at a product, for example, many brokerages, to somewhat artificially boost their FDIC insurance limits while staying within the letter of all regulations. The FDIC is kind of the least not thrilled about this, but the products work as advertised for the moment. Those continue to work, by the way, orderly bank failures. How to ensure that the money is there on Monday? Well, the bank didn't fail in a day. It has been making bad loans for years. It's supervisors, regulators, have almost certainly noticed its deteriorating health for a while. They told the bank to correct its loan practices and raise more capital. That didn't happen. As an aside, one of the things that most frustrates me about the banking crisis of 2023 is that, in fact, we did not have situational awareness among banking regulators that the situation was as bad as it was. The FDIC had been saying in very general terms, well, if the interest rate environment keeps moving up, a lot of banks are going to be in trouble. But the banks that were actually factually in the most trouble were not on the problem bank list, which is treated as a state secret over a reverse engineered it, and managed to prove that, for example, SBB was not on the problem bank list at the point which it failed. Some of the post mortems of the supervisory action subsequent to the 2023 crisis, the allocate to supervisors being poorly informed about the banks they were supervising. A very gobsmacking one from the Fed says that the Fed didn't realize, well, banking supervisors probably did not realize that silvergate bank, the what I descriptively call the first national bank of crypto had pivoted from being a two branch real estate bank to being a crypto focused monoline bank. Monoline bank basically silvergate had IPO on the basis of that business model. If you as the regulator don't understand that that has happened, that's a skill issue as the kids would say. So eventually on a Friday, the supervisor, which is not the FDIC, tells the bank that it is failed concurrently with this the FDIC swings into action. The micro bank accounts of this are fascinating. They resemble a police raid on the bank headquarters except mostly conducted by people who look like accountants. And in some cases, they are that action is in almost all cases selling deposits and assets of the bank to another financial institution. Banks benefit from scale. This is the core reason they open new branches at the margin. The FDIC's proposal is a bunch of perfectly good branches with perfectly good bankers just came on the market. They've also got some assets and well, nobody gets here if the assets are also perfectly good. But almost any pile of assets is good at the right price. Let's make a deal. In cases where the bank is not actually insolvent, where they truly are just having liquidity problems, subsuming them into a larger healthier bank solves the problem outright. The acquiring bank gets their assets an attractive price and the losses difference between the value of the assets and that attractive price are borne by equity holders in the original bank. Who will often be zero doubt or close to it? The FDIC prioritizes deposit recovery at lowest cost to the FDIC's insurance fund, not the interest of bank shareholders. If you have reached this point, you have been called upon to perform the sacred duty of equity in a bank. Take the L to preserve the depositors interests. What about in more advanced cases where the loan book is so bad or marketing conditions are so stressed that the bank is insolvent? In these cases, the FDIC attempts to throw in a sweetener to the acquiring bank. That sweetener often takes the form of a shared loss agreement, SLA. Suppose, for example, that the FDIC models that are failing bank with approximately $100 million in deposits and $100 million in loans, will take a proxy of nearly $5 million in loan losses over the next few years. They could write an SLA with the acquiring bank saying, here's a $5 million cash payout which will make available to you immediately, covering those doubtful loans. You are contractually obligated to continue servicing them. If you actually get any recovery, wonderful. Keep 20% for your efforts and send 80% back to us. The SLA is so named because the acquiring bank and the FDIC's insurance fund split the cost of loan losses. It could also be called the form of private leverage on the insurance fund. The private sector equity in the acquiring bank absorbs much of the risk of the loan book, versus, for example, the FDIC having to actually sell the loan book and what is likely a distressed market. This theoretically minimizes the cash outlay of the insurance fund. You can actually read through the list of bank failures and see how boringly functional this all is. For example, if you were a depositor at a tiny $100 million bank in Florida, if you've never heard of, when it failed at 2020, you lost $0.00 and 0 cents, and it cost the FDIC of about $10 million. The deposit insurance fund had in 2022 about $120 billion in it. 2023 did not go as smoothly as we would have hoped for the deposit insurance fund, largely in the interest of limiting contagion to the rest of the regional banks and potentially to the broader financial system. There was a decision made to make the extraordinary backstop of all deposits at the banks that were under the most stress and had failed, such as SBV and eventually First Republic. We effectively messaged that there would be unlimited FDIC insurance in the interests of preventing, quote, systemic risk. As for the why of that, you can read more about it in other places that I will link to some here. The cost of insurance. The cost of deposit insurance is borne by banks as a mandatory cost of doing business. It generally scales with their total liabilities, prior to the GFC, it was deposits only. And is weighted based on the perceived degree of risk, similar to most insurance pricing. The insurance costs between 3 and 40 basis points per year, which you can compare to the interest rate more or non-year deposits. This magical failure limiting technology is very not free. The exact determinants of the deposit insurance pricing are mostly interesting to banking nerds. One, which is worthy of comment, a bank has charged modestly higher rates if they are heavily dependent on broken deposits. As we previously discussed in bits about money, broker deposits are critically important to the economic model for brokerages and many fintechs. They're also ruthlessly priced sensitive deposits, operating by professional money managers. Most deposits are not. If professional money managers think a bank is imperiled, theirs will be the first money out of the door. Dependent on broker deposits increases the risk of liquidity fright, during time substress, and therefore increases the risk that the insurance fund will have to pay out more to cover a bank's failure. Accordingly, there's a surcharge for them. As an aside, this was exactly the thing that did a signature bank in. While signature had relatively sizable deposit concentration in cryptocurrency related assets, I believe it was about 20%. They had a much larger concentration in broker deposits, and those broker deposits left very, very quickly late in the week when SBB had already failed. This is also designed as a policy mechanism to encourage more banks to build more stable deposit bases. Building deposit bases takes hard work over many years doing the boring business of banking. That is why picking up the phone to a deposit broker is so attractive even where it is more costly to the bank. The ultimate backstops. The FDIC has at least two advantages backstopping insurance scheme, which more typical insurers do not. The first is that it enjoys the full faith and credit of the United States government. If it depletes the entirety of the insurance reserve in a crisis, that is exceptionally bad news which the entire world will read about. But, depositors still get paid because the federal government cannot run out of money. That is, again, to maintain depositors trust in the moniness of all deposits at all institutions, even the bad ones, come hell or high water. The second is that the FDIC exists in a constellation with the Federal Reserve, which is the lender of last resort for banks. During crises, when the prices of many pools of assets tend to get even more correlated and organic buyers disappear for them, or charge increased discounts to the notional values that the premium for liquidity increases, the Federal Reserve has the option of buying financial assets or lending money to financial institutions so that they can do the same. This was one of the mechanisms for the troubled asset release program, TARP. A full accounting event is outside the scope of the SSA, but most non-specialists believe it to have been more of a handout than it was. And under appreciated degree, it substituted government liquidity for dried up private liquidity, and successfully charged a premium for it. As an aside, in 2023, we also had an extraordinary and temporary assumption of risk on behalf of banks, which many banks used to tap additional liquidity, and that was wound down a year later with, thankfully, no additional failures after the first few banks have failed. Deposit insurance is ubiquitous infrastructure underlying everything. There were vaginally few bank failures. This did not used to be the case. Deposit insurance was, along with the larger supervisory apparatus and substantial ongoing work from the private sector, a major component in breaking the negative feedback loops which previously caused individual failures and repeated frequent systemic banking crises. It is difficult to overstate how important this technology is. You rely on it in much the same degree. You do electricity, running water, and stable internet connections. Like a much infrastructure, it is so good you'll hopefully never even have to realize it is there. And I'll say as a final aside, indeed, in 2023, the deposit insurance game was so good that I slept through most of the banking crisis despite being banked at one of the banks that indeed failed. And now I am a happy customer at the bank that subsumed them after the FDIC workout program, which that bank was paid, I believe, about $10 billion or so. I'll have to look up the number to do. But that's neither here nor there. Anyhow, thanks very much for listening and see you next week on Complex Systems. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Complex Systems. If you'd have comments, drop me an email or hit me up at patio 11 on Twitter. Ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons, and also because they let me know what you like.