It's an idea so radical that in mainstream academic and financial circles, it borders on heresy -- the sort of thing that in the past only Turkey's populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the most zealous disciples of Modern Monetary Theory would dare utter publicly.

But the new converts -- along with a handful who confess to being at least curious about the idea -- say the economic evidence is becoming impossible to ignore.

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This is, the contrarians argue, because the jump in benchmark rates from 0% to over 5% is providing Americans with a significant stream of income from their bond investments and savings accounts for the first time in two decades. "The reality is people have more money," says Kevin Muir, a former derivatives trader at RBC Capital Markets who now writes an investing newsletter called The MacroTourist.

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Einhorn notes that US households receive income on more than $13 trillion of short-term interest-bearing assets, almost triple the $5 trillion in consumer debt, excluding mortgages, that they have to pay interest on. At today's rates, that translates to a net gain for households of some $400 billion a year, he estimates.

We would note also that present structural interest rates aren't actually "high" -- they're still historically a bit low (with the average prior to the QE era being around 6%). Money does need some time value for the economy to work properly, we've been saying around here for over 15 years...

We've suspected for a while that Jerome Powell secretly agrees with this stance, too.

(A final point, consumer interest rates have lost most coupling from the Funds rate and similar rates a long time ago. With usury laws buried, typical consumer credit card rates have been north of 22% for a long time. When the funds rate went up from 0% to 5%, these credit card rate levels bumped up to 25-30%. So what? That's just not a significant enough proportional change to make a difference. We just don't see many out there who would make different buying decisions on a 30% CC versus a 25% CC; and the population who would default at each rate level is probably the same. Therefore, overall, we would think that Einhorn's point about consumers ending up with more cash when structural interest rates go up as being on the balance, the prevailing factor.)

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Yet Mr. Kelly of J.P. Morgan lists various reasons that periods of U.S. economic growth may be elongated and less chaotic going forward. Federal deposit insurance, introduced after the Depression, sharply reduced bank panics and failures. Vastly improved information on inventory levels among goods-producing businesses, he said, has "tamed" the inventory cycle, preventing mismatches between supply and demand that can cause mass layoffs.

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[But] Mr. Herndon noted the work of the 20th-century Polish economist Michal Kalecki, who argued that business leaders feel "undermined" by the maintenance of full employment. Using their substantial influence over policy, Kalecki argued, they can help institute restrictive economic policies that bring times of economic expansion to an end and reset them with softer, more tolerable labor power.

And Mr. Herndon said he thought old-fashioned "bubble" manias and "credit cycles" remained a danger, too.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly warned that rates will need to remain "higher for longer" to truly tame inflation. But many Wall Street leaders, encouraged at inflation's steep fall from its June 2022 four-decade high, believe peak rates are already here.

Grant, however, takes a historical reading of monetary policy, and argues we're in for a generation of rising rates, with some volatility in between. "The phrase would be higher for much, much, much, much longer--but we have to underscore and italicize the conditional--if past is prologue," he told Fortune.

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"We seem to have hit some major point of demarcation with interest rates in 2020 and ‘21," he added. Based on history, he said, this new regime should last 40 years. Still, Grant clarified that the generation-long uptick likely won't be a straight line up. If a recession hits, there could be a "substantial," although temporary, pullback in interest rates.

Trading in both firms triggered multiple volatility halts after PacWest fell as much as 42% while Western Alliance plunged 27%. The KBW Regional Banking Index dropped as much as 7%, the most since the crisis that engulfed Silicon Valley Bank in March. 

Charles Schwab Corp., a brokerage with a banking arm that's come under pressure in the recent rout, sank 5.3%. Comerica Inc. and Zions Bancorp. each fell more than 10%.

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Part of what's driving bank shares down is the fact that many regional bank investors assumed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would announce a change to deposit insurance alongside its announcements about the First Republic receivership process, said Gary Tenner, an analyst at DA Davidson. The level of uninsured deposits at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature played a key role in the bank runs that led to their downfall.

First Republic, whose assets were battered by the rise in interest rates, had struggled to stay alive after two other lenders collapsed last month, spooking depositors and investors.

First Republic was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and immediately sold to JPMorgan. The deal was announced hours before U.S. markets are set to open, and after a scramble by officials over the weekend.

Later on Monday, 84 First Republic branches in eight states will reopen as JPMorgan branches.

JPMorgan will "assume all of the deposits and substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank," the F.D.I.C. said in a statement. The regulator estimated that its insurance fund would have to pay out about $13 billion to cover First Republic's losses. JPMorgan also said that the F.D.I.C. would provide it with $50 billion in financing.

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After a year of rapidly rising rates, there's greater incentive to avoid being stagnant with cash. While many money-market funds are paying more than 4% interest, Schwab's sweep accounts offer just 0.45%.

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"As a result of rapidly increasing short-term interest rates in 2022, the company saw an increase in the pace at which clients moved certain cash balances" into higher-yielding alternatives, Schwab said in its annual report. "As these outflows have continued, they have outpaced excess cash on hand and cash generated by maturities and pay-downs on our investment portfolios."

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To plug the gap, the brokerage's banking units borrowed $12.4 billion from the FHLB system through the end of 2022, and had the capacity to borrow $68.6 billion, according to an annual report filed with regulators. Schwab borrowed an additional $13 billion from the FHLB so far this year, the filing showed.

But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review -- getting a more careful look -- and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions.

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It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality.

By early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a "horizontal review," an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies -- but at that point, the bank's days were numbered. In early March, it faced a run and failed within a matter of days.

Major questions have been raised about why regulators failed to spot problems and take action early enough to prevent Silicon Valley Bank's March 10 downfall.

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The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed -- but ignored the concerns.

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The bank, which is also weighing options for shoring up liquidity, is expected to draw interest from larger rivals, said some of the people, all of whom requested anonymity discussing confidential information. No decision has been reached and the bank could still choose to remain independent, they said. A spokesperson for First Republic Bank declined to comment.

First Republic said Sunday that it had more than $70 billion in unused liquidity to fund operations from agreements that included the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Still, its stock fell 21% Wednesday in New York trading to a decade-low of $31.16, giving it a market value of $5.8 billion.

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The lender specializes in private banking and wealth management, and has made an effort to differentiate itself from Silicon Valley Bank, which has been seized by US regulators. Unlike SVB, which counted startups and venture firms among its biggest clients, First Republic said that no sector represents more than 9% of total business deposits.

"Big picture, this was the right thing to do," said Christina Parajon Skinner, an expert on central banking and financial regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. But she added that it could still encourage financial betting by reinforcing the idea that the government would step in to clean up the mess if the financial system faced trouble.

"There are questions about moral hazard," she said.

One of the signals the rescue sent was to depositors: If you hold a large bank account, the moves suggested that the government would step in to protect you in a crisis. That might be desirable -- several experts on Monday said it might be smart to revise deposit insurance to cover accounts bigger than $250,000.

But it could give big depositors less incentive to pull their money out if their banks take big risks, which could in turn give the financial institutions a green light to be less careful.

That could merit new safeguards to guard against future danger, said William English, a former director of the monetary affairs division at the Fed who is now at Yale. He thinks that bank runs in 2008 and recent days have illustrated that a system of partial deposit insurance doesn't really work, he said.

"Market discipline doesn't really happen until it's too late, and then it's too sharp," he said. "But if you don't have that, what is limiting the risk-taking of banks?"

. The bank said the move raises its unused liquidity to $70 billion, before any funding it could get from the new Fed facility.

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While First Republic is not as concentrated in one industry as SVB was with technology, the bank does tend to cater to businesses and wealthy individuals who tend to have large uninsured deposits.

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While SVB had an unusually high percentage of uninsured deposits, there are other mid-sized banks that could be at risk of large withdrawals.

"We believe regionals with less diversified and large uninsured deposit bases are at risk of deposit flight but not at the speed of SVB and they should have time to tap wholesale funding markets (such as FHLB) and raise cash levels. In a fragile environment like we are in, we believe banks should be cautious about the potential negative signaling effect of raising deposit rates to keep deposits," Citi analyst Keith Horowitz said in a note to clients.

We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority. All depositors of this institution will be made whole. As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses will be borne by the taxpayer.''