Every bank run in history has the same picture. A line forms outside a branch, the line turns into a crowd, and the crowd turns into a headline. In March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank lost more than $40 billion in a single day, and the line formed on phones instead of sidewalks. It still looked like fear.
The next run may not look like anything at all. No one will panic, and no one will stand in line. Millions of people will simply tell their software to find them a better rate, and the software will do it, every night, for everyone, at once.
On September 27, Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok published a note titled "Is an Agentic bank run coming? His point was blunt. Checking accounts pay a national average of 0.1%. Other accounts pay 3.3% to 5%. If every household used an AI agent to optimize its cash, he wrote, banks could lose a large share of "the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans."
This Long Game follows that money out the door. It goes first into Treasury bills, by way of a new kind of dollar, and the trail ends at a question about what the dollar itself is worth.
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