A bank can be perfectly healthy on Friday and mathematically doomed by Monday, even if it has plenty of cash.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
The Periodic Topology of Risk (TPTR): Organizational Mass, Chronomic Turning Radius, and the Architecture of Temporal Sovereignty in Financial Institutions
SSRN · 6574209
The Takeaway
Regulators focus on 'capital requirements'—basically, how much money a bank has in the vault. But this paper argues that bank failures are actually caused by a 'Chronomic Turning Radius.' This is the physical time it takes for a massive institution to pivot its strategy versus how fast its 'liquidity runway' is shrinking. If the bank is too 'heavy' to turn faster than its money is running out, it’s already dead; it just doesn't know it yet. For you, this means the safety of your savings depends more on a bank's 'maneuverability' than its balance sheet.
From the abstract
The banking failures of 2023 revealed a structural fault in contemporary risk architecture: regulatory compliance and institutional survival have decoupled. Three of the largest U.S. bank failures in history occurred within fifty-two days at institutions classified as well-capitalised under Basel III metrics on the eve of their insolvency. This paper argues that this decoupling is not incidental but systemic, arising from the persistent treatment of time as a passive container for risk rather th