Bank accounts are risky. They are put options on the value of the assets banks choose to buy. Staid mutual fund holdings are risky. They are parking areas for assets others are dumping. You are taking these risks, as are lots of others, without asking much in the way of upside. Which you are of course free to do. But if you think they are existentially safer, you simply haven't grokked yet that a contract with anyone is only worth as much as the counterparty's actual ability to pay.
"But it is insured by the FDIC". So, what are the FDIC's assets? "But it is backed up by the treasury". So are Fannie and Freddie debts, de facto, which is what you are apparently objecting to. But so what? What are the assets of the treasury? What is its word worth? What's a dollar?
The gulf cooperation council's proven oil reserves, at today's prices, are worth all the stock in the world, with enough left over as spare change to buy all the US agency paper there is.
At tomorrows, who knows. More, less. A risk.
There is no such thing as a riskless asset, because an asset is somebody else's liability. Unless you plan to eat it yourself, biologically speaking, the value of anything you can hold depends on other's demands and through that on others' net worth.
well, that goes without saying. I suppose a Hobbesian nightmare is a possibility, and that depending on society for *anything* is a “risk.”
And we could all die from an asteroid, too.
Within reason, however, there are risks, and then there are *risks*. Absent a total crash, people should be able to depend on safe investments like savings accounts being there for them, as long as they don’t put too much into any one institution.