Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — Practice that guarantees everything after the fact isn’t a statute. It’s a habit, and habits in deposit insurance teach the next treasurer that the cap is a suggestion.

The tools handled a weekend. They didn’t handle the incentive, and the incentive is now public: a concentrated uninsured depositor in a bank that can frighten a Thursday gets a Saturday facility.

Write a thin statute. Raise or tier the cap for transaction accounts that are genuinely payroll, price the extra cover, and require duration and concentration reporting a supervisor can’t wave off.

Don’t write a cathedral that smothers a community lender that never ran a venture payroll.

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — A regime that depends on emergency creativity is sufficient only until the creativity is politically inconvenient.

The specific failure is worth naming. This wasn’t credit. Nobody’s loans went bad. A bank bought long bonds with short deposits at the bottom of the rate cycle, classified them so the losses didn’t show, and had a depositor base that could leave in an afternoon.

That’s interest-rate risk in a portfolio the accounting called safe, and the examination didn’t reach it. Any statute that doesn’t fix that specific hole is fighting the last crisis.

Novi, MI Correspondent — Treasurers here learned a new sentence this spring: the official cap isn’t the real cap if the depositors can text.

That sentence is incompatible with sufficiency. Sufficient for the firm that got the exception, yes. For the firm that stayed under the posted rule and paid into a fund that covered someone else’s concentration, no.

Make the real cap visible. If payroll accounts need a higher limit, say the number and charge for it.

Clermont, FL Correspondent — Florida households under the cap didn’t need a new religion. Florida firms with operating cash in one fashionable name learned they were uninsured until they weren’t.

Until they weren’t is the problem. Practice that can flip a cap over a weekend is panic management rather than law, and panic management that repeats becomes the product.

Define which balances get extraordinary cover, price them, and make resolution playbooks public enough that a treasurer can plan without assuming a rescue. Public playbooks reduce runs. Mystery cover increases them.

Dayton, OH Correspondent — A shop here keeps payroll at a bank you can drive to, and that shop shouldn’t pay in assessments for a resolution theory invented to soothe a coastal treasury office.

The cap is real until a politically salient run and then it isn’t. Write the exception or retire the pretense.

Scalpel: transaction-account cover with a premium, concentration limits that bite when the depositor is a flock, examination authority that can call a bond pile a rate bet whatever the accounting name.

Not a scalpel: new capital rules that land on the Dayton lender because somebody else had a duration hobby.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Ports keep balances that exceed the number, and we also remember what a frozen payment system does to a berth.

Containment isn’t sufficiency. Sufficiency is a rule a treasurer can quote before the run rather than a facility he learns about on television.

Pre-authorize a narrow cover for clearing and payroll with a pre-set assessment formula, and force the examination to treat duration and uninsured concentration as first-class risks.

Practice plus silence produces two prices of insurance — posted and political — and two prices is how you get the next herd.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — The analytical point is that the run was faster than any historical model contemplated and the models haven’t been updated.

Something over forty billion left in a single day, and the attempt the following morning was for more than that again. Deposit outflow assumptions in liquidity rules were built on a branch-banking era when a run required standing in a queue.

Every stress framework in use assumes a slower withdrawal than is now physically possible. That’s a parameter problem rather than a philosophy problem, and it can be fixed in a rule without a statute.

What needs the statute is the cap question, because that’s a political promise and political promises should be voted.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — The cap is real or it isn’t. This spring said it isn’t, for some.

Price extra cover for payroll cash. Put duration in the examination. Don’t smother the small shop.

Practice that rescues the loud is a lesson, and lessons without text get repeated.

Knoxville, TN Correspondent — County deposits and county loans aren’t the institutions that failed, and a statute that can’t say that sentence will tax the county for the herd.

Practice contained a fire and advertised a put. Advertised puts must be priced and bounded or they become the business model of the next fashionable book.

Sufficient is a rule you can explain at a school-board finance meeting without saying “unless they panic.”