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Epic Economist 11/8/23
"The Bank Outages Nobody Thinks Possible
Are Here And People Will Freak Out This Winter"
"The biggest banks in the United States are reporting widespread bank outages for a sixth consecutive day. At the same time, another bank just collapsed, marking the fifth bank failure of 2023. Since last Friday, systemwide processing errors have been leaving millions of customers without access to their money. And while companies insist this is just a temporary glitch, Bloomberg reports that several institutions are still under threat, and experts say more failures would be unsurprising at this point.
Americans are outraged with the situation. The outages are keeping many people from paying their bills in time and making them accrue interest debt while they wait for their deposits. Now, six days after the systemwide disruptions began, clients have been reporting not only deposit delays but other distressing issues with transfers, duplicated withdrawals, and more. Some say they haven’t been able to log in to their online accounts for days.
It seems that Bank of America and Wells Fargo clients are being particularly hard hit by the outages. DownDetector reported that the banks’ customers were still experiencing issues with funds transfers, online banking, and retrieving account balances today. "@BankofAmerica Day 4 & still no direct deposit, no update on potential resolution or at the very least what's being done to resolve the issue, no transparency, no assistance, no communication from you all at all. Nothing. Wow. This is so bizarre," one person wrote on X on Monday morning.
Though the situation has just gotten some media attention, the truth is that since mid-October, financial institutions have been silently facing operational issues. On October 20, international bank Barclays reported an outage that hit more than 2.5 million people globally. The institutions’ online banking platform locked customers out of their accounts, and given that the bank only offers online services in many countries, clients pointed out that in-branch banking wasn’t an option, highlighting the importance of having cash holdings on hand.
For smaller banks, rising interest rates have only aggravated their woes. That’s the case with Iowa-based Citizens Bank, the fifth financial institution that collapsed this year. In a news release, regulators with the Iowa Division of Banking said Citizens was declared insolvent earlier this week when bank examiners “identified significant loan losses that had not previously been identified by the bank. The failure was triggered by bankruptcies in the trucking sector amid a nationwide freight recession.
Higher interest rates are also endangering banks that have higher exposure to consumer debt, mortgage, and commercial real estate loans. At the moment, thousands of office blocks purchased with debt remain half-empty as remote work becomes more popular. These buildings will have to be torn down. In other words, their value is about to sharply drop, leaving hundreds of regional banks sitting on crippling losses.
With businesses facing tighter credit conditions, it’s only a matter of time before mass bankruptcies start to occur. That will create a self-fulfilling prophecy as borrowers default on their loans, causing struggling banks to take on huge losses and also go under. We’re definitely in the middle of a banking crisis that will be unlike anything we have ever seen before, and we should strategize now because things are starting to look very ugly."
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