These stories came around a few years ago when swap spreads went negative, and it seems like the same mistakes in interpretation are being made again. Negative

These stories came around a few years ago when swap spreads went negative, and it seems like the same mistakes in interpretation are being made again. Negative swap spreads do NOT imply that big banks are more creditworthy than the US Treasury. That is obviously fallacious. You are comparing apples and oranges. If you want to do a fair comparison, compare the yield on a Treasury bond with the yield on a non-callable bank bond of the same maturity. Guess what? The Treasury yield will be lower. Or if you prefer, look at the CDS market and compare the CDS spread for protection on the US Government vs the spread for any major bank. Again, the US government spread is less. If you want to understand this, you need to think about what kind of arbitrage trade would profit from this situation and why it's not happening in large enough size to reverse this. You'll realize that the operative constraints are not fears about the creditworthiness of the US government.