If a company is “too big to fail” the punishment should be that the government bails them out, then breaks it up into smaller parts that are free to fail or succeed naturally without government intervention
Just nationalize them. If the government has to bail them out then then the government just bought them. If a company is too big to fail then it’s too big to be privately owned.
That’s what they did in my country when a bunch of the big banks almost keeled over in 2008/2009. They were temporarily (partly) owned by the state and eventually bought back their rights to operate as a separate business when things were going better again.
That’s actually what the US government did with at least one of our failed companies as well, General Motors.
Should’ve done it to all the banks and house loan companies too imo.
They also gave GM a 45 billion dollar stock swap and GM never paid it back. They paid back the loan but not the stock swap. Every time I hear people brag about how the government saved GM I wonder what amazing things any company could do with not only 45 billion to play with but the government ensuring that no one could take them down for a year.
Give me 45 billion and the full faith and credit of uncle sam, I will create so many jobs.
The problem with that is that goverments are shit at running companies, so the ownership should always be <50%. But they should definitely get stock or bonds for the bailouts. And if selling less than 50% of the company off to the government won’t get them enough money to stay operating, they need to just give up.
I don’t want them to be nationalized though, I want them to be able to operate without needing government intervention, basically the exact opposite
Are you just talking about bailouts or regulations in general? Because businesses need to be regulated.
Just bailouts
Let them keep their control of the company, but give shares of the company to the American people who paid to bail them out.
Everyone gets dividends
Nationalize them and turn the former business into a 501:c3. Also fire the entire C-Suite, with cause to prevent any golden parachute payments.
But I was told that the rich leaders take risks!
…right?
Sure they do. With your pension they are bold.
What if we just give every American a portion of the company that we bailed out?
Eventually the average American would own stocks in many different banks.
Eventually the American people will have majority share, at that point we vote on the actions of the bank as if we were the board.
A sovereign fund will be easier to administer. Issuing individual shares to people directly would be an administrative nightmare.
Allow the sovereign fund to acquire the shares, and then we can vote as board members in a national vote, though we’d probably just elect a representative for the fund.
Fuck all this representative bullshit. They never actually represent us.
That sounds like a great plan to have the money squandered.
Maybe the dividend is just applied towards your tax return, that would reduce the complexity of issuing 350k shares. I don’t want politicians getting their grubby hands on the money.
Maybe the government should give the money to the employees and if they feel that the company can make a come back they can invest the money in it. If not they can use the money to move on.
That seems fair. If the powers that be where I work for offered me to invest in the comoany itself I would do that. I bet I would get a better return over an index fund the way business is going. Of course they would find some way to fuck it up and corrupt it.
That’s not something that really works with industries that are zero sum games. You can’t have a dozen competing rail companies in a given state because there is only so many paths that a rail system can take, and you need to clear out continuous stretches of land through eminent domain.
If a company provides a vital services and fails, it should be nationalized. If a company does not provide a vital service and fails, it shouldbe allowed to fail and the employees themselves bailed out.
Not much of a “punishment” to the business to have socialized losses. Oh you’ve mismanaged your ginormous business and it’s going to cause a huge, negative ripple effect on the economy and impact everyone else? Here’s some free money, courtesy of working class taxpayers! Also we’re going to break you up and place no restrictions on how big you can get so that one of your smaller entities can inevitably get enough market share to be in a position to do the same thing a decade later! Huh? Punishment? Oh… Uh… Don’t do that again please, Mr. Business, sir 🥺
Hard to effectively punish entities that feel no pain and are otherwise basically immortal
Best we can really do is mow the grass periodically (which the US gov has been failing to do for a LONG time now, although we’re starting to see anti-trust rumblings in the tech industry now thankfully)
It’s not the best we can do, though. The best we could do would be for workers to own the means of production.
The best we can realistically do in our current time and place, then
Nah, we could definitely start taking back business thru unions and co-ops
That’s what usually happens in Europe. Companies get bailed and either restructured or nationalised. But muh fridoomz!
Mh, not necessarily. After 2009, many banks were just saved and not a lot else changed. Although admittedly, banks too big to fail have special monitoring and are subject to extra harsh rules, but they weren’t broken up.
Parex failed, got bailed and nationalised as Citadele. Touche.
I didn’t know about that one, thank you. I guess good examples are there, and I’ll keep it in mind now :)
or the government should get a significant amount of shares on the company
There should be no such thing as “government bail out”. If they need money, they can issue shares or bonds to the government just like to anyone else.
If that’s not enough to keep them afloat to the future, there’s another mechanism to dealing with that:
How do you determine when a company is in this “too big to fail” category, to get access to this program?
How do you draw the lines in that company to fractionate it? Geographically? Randomly?
How do you determine when a company is in this “too big to fail” category, to get access to this program?
If a company is about to go bankrupt and congress decides it’s too important to let that happen, exactly how it happens currently
How do you draw the lines in that company to fractionate it? Geographically? Randomly?
That’s for business people, lawyers, and politicians to figure out, it’s happened multiple times before, look into the breakup of Standard Oil or Bell
Hell, it doesn’t even have to be UBI, just some assistance during Covid would’ve been nice. That one random $1500 check was treated like it was a king’s random and it was probably less than one month’s rent for alot of people.
Some will argue (and I do not know if it is true) that that is what triggered inflation now. Well, that, plus business loans during covid.
Others will argue that corporate greed was the cause of inflation, and they’d point to plenty of companies making record profits while raising their prices.
The same corporations had record losses before that. Inflation comes from free money, it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain.
Corporate greed always existed. Thus, it is not the one that triggered inflation.
Removed by mod
No need for ad hominem attacks. Profiteering has always been a part of inflation but it’s never the cause or the underlying reason that inflation occurs. There are a host of things that go into what drives inflation but during Covid it was the Fed dumping tons of money into the system and post Covid it was wage inflation and low unemployment. Do corporations still use predatory pricing? You bet. The only thing that will really work now is either very deep recession or a depression.
Wow, just wow. It is OK to disagree, but what’s wrong with you to just start doing personal attacks out of blue? Do you consider yourself a good human being? If yes, look at your post again.
As for the topic of discussion, you have to learn the meaning of the word “trigger”. Also, your analogy does not stand at all, because I was not claiming that corporate greed is good, just that it is not the trigger.
So, because it always existed, it’s not possible for it to have gotten worse and contributed more to the problem?
Galaxy brain take.
Those people are wilfully ignoring the 3 trillion pumped into the market to prop it up when it crashed in 2020, which absolutely dwarfs the pittance handed out as stimulus.
That’s different. That money is the federal reserve printing, well, money and exchanging it for existing securities. They can always get money back in exchange for those securities if there is money oversupply. It is reversible.
When federal government spends more money than it has, there is no reverse mechanism, because the government does not get securities in exchange of new money it introduced to economy.
Don’t forget Money Center banks like BofA went from 10% fractional reserve (they needed to theoretically have 10% of the amount they were lending) to 0%. That’s just a fancy way of saying they can print money by fiat just like the Fed does. The Fed is weird though because it may as well be owned by the banks as well, but the head of the Fed is appointed by the president.
There are arguments though that given our somewhat teetering system that they did some “goodish” things to prevent all out collapse. Their actions have not changed anything systemic though, and the system it’s arguably the problem.
I am not quite sure how big the impact of it is on inflation. I thought even before, banks could just go and take cash from federal reserve (borrow), essentially unlimited amount and that counted as reserve. So, from practical point of view, if they saw that they can lend the money with foot risk/benefit profile, they could always do that. And they would not have to pay rate for the money which is in reserve. So, not quite sure if inflation depends on this much.
I think this is a reasonable argument. A lot of it seems to just have been companies using inflation as an excuse to raise prices causing more inflation.
Company does not need excuses. It needs explanation for shareholders, to show that they adjust the price to have maximum profits. Nearly no customer will look at the increased price of the product and think “it is expensive, so I can’t afford to buy it, but they have good excuse why it is expensive, so I will buy it anyway”.
Yeah, I bet. Did they? Reverse it?
Yes, that’s what the high fed rate means - they are taking it back, but because it was combination of the what Federal Reserve printed and the USGov “printed”, there is disbalance, and the rates end up too high, thus inflation.
True in the U.S. Except, of course, in Alaska. Somehow in Alaska, very red state Alaska, home to Sarah Palin, every state resident gets a dividend from the oil revenue. Not that I approve of the reason why considering no one should be making revenue by fossil fuels, but somehow Republicans are fine with that exception. I wish they were pressed on it occasionally.
Conservatives love telling people that winning or losing is a personal failure, and hate government interference, but also love to make life as easy as possible for large corps.
They clearly understand that regulation works, and that governments working to stabilize a country can be really powerful, and then they go and do entirely the wrong shit about while swearing that regulation is evil and governments are evil. It’s all just feelings and whatever they hear first/whatever is oversimplified and yelled.
They’re fine with it because voters would hate to have their free money taken away
Oh, but isn’t it an ‘entitlement?’
That’s the point. It’s entitlement when poor people do it. It’s “the fair share that they deserve” when they do it. If conservatives didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have standards at all.
I wonder, do the indigenous peoples of Alaska get that?
I believe they do, but I’m not 100% sure.
Why wouldn’t they? They’ve been US citizens since 1817.
I could be wrong, but I believe that all Native Americans that still identify as their indigenous nations, and live on the reservations are considered citizens of sovereign nations by the US. That’s why I was asking.
To be fair, government bailouts are not just free money the government gives large corporations with no attached expectations. When the government bailed out GM, for example, the treasury gave GM $52 billion. $6.7 billion was considered a loan (with interest) which GM has since paid back. The rest was an investment resulting in a 32% ownership of GM by the US Treasury.
There’s also a shit tonne of people and other businesses that rely on a company like GM.
It would be terrible for everyone involved, not just the economy but also for quality of life. Bailouts are bad, but not bailing out is worse. So what do we do? (Sorta) simple, legislation the prevents the amount of risks that banks are allowed to take. My proof is by counter example. The great financial crisis of 2008 was due to deregulation, mainly pushed by Regan era policy. Limits on banks force them to take their due diligence with each loan and decreases the risks of bubbles (crypto, housing, coins, etc.) forming in the first place.
Bailouts are worse. Whatever you subsidize you get more of, so if you subsidize financial mismanagement you get more of the same. It is called a preverse incentive a term I am sure your economics 101 class didn’t mention for a reason. The same reason why preachers don’t mention the stuff about Jesus saying to pay taxes.
It is better to let the banks fall, FDIC the accounts, and make sure the bankruptcy courts make recommendations to the AG office for criminal prosecution.
Besides which there was really no danger of AIG or Goldman folding. They lied about their financial situation. By the time it crashes they had moved all of their toxic assets into pension funds.
And there is a shit ton of people going bankrupt over medication costs, housing costs, and student loan debt. Do you care about those issue as much as you care about giving a car corporation more money to make oversized gas-guzzlers?
The fuck are you getting pissy at me for. Fuck the employees and their families I guess.
I didn’t know this was a binary issue.
People like you are the reason why everyone is so broke. You care about your tribe and no one else. Did your UAW workers get a pay raise? Cool, and fuck everyone else. Give me free money
The fuck are you on about.
On top of this, there is arguably avoidance of a huge negatives impact on workers in GM and elsewhere. So not only the shareholders who were benefiting. And even within shareholders there are regular people, pension funds, etc. Some bailouts make sense.
No bailouts make sense ever. If you really want to give free money to people just give it to them. You don’t need to make sure that their shitty employer is still shitty tomorrow.
With obesity being a big problem, we could always frame UBI as being for individuals too big to fail as well.
I’m ignorant, and maybe I shouldn’t ask this in a meme community, but wouldn’t a UBI become the new $0?
Like all the corporations now know we get x-amount more so now prices are adjusted to take a portion of that across all sectors, and now I’m back to not being about to afford the same things as before? Idk I don’t have an econ degree.
Not really. It’s not magical money that just appears.
It’s redistributed money.
Things may increase in price, not because of greed, but because supply and demand jumped dramatically. Think of all the people who now have money to buy random things like treats or toys.
That’s not a bad thing! Suddenly, companies need to hire more people to increase supply, because people have resources to spend.
Expensive stuff still exists. No matter what. But the bare minimum quality of life increases dramatically.
No because taxation would be adjusted so the average person is no better off.
It’s about raising the lowest earners to a minimum level that they’re able to live on, without making them jump through hoops or prove they are poor or prove they have been looking for work for 40 hours a week or some bullshit.
The way I think about it is by creating a scenario. We give 100% of people $1000 dollars (just for sake of argument). Some people use this for groceries, others for car payments, others for investments. Some people don’t even realize they got that money bc they were so rich. Some people can afford to pay for school supplies for kids. They key point is not everyone is using it for the same thing.
The reason it sounds like it should become the new zero is bc it does happen in some situations. If the government gave everyone that rents $100, then landlords will raise rent by $100 a month later. The main difference between the two is how specific the scope of the money is.
Yes, there would be economic changes (not necessarily downsides) such as higher inflation due to government spending, but also increased GDP which will stimulate the economy drastically. It will lead to higher unemployment, not bc people stop needing to work, but bc they can quit their second job or focus on taking care of kids full time (which that actually doesn’t change unemployment, but it would change the workforce numbers).
I am not an economics major or anything, but I tried to give reasons to explain why we would expect these changes to happen in the real world.
UK gave away a lot of money during the pandemic to support low earners, it backfired real hard.
Governments should invest into education so people can move to more productive jobs which pay more money. That will improve the lives of everyone. There should be no low skilled jobs in developed countries. Giving free money instead is always a bad idea.
Those corporations would still be competing with each other to be the one we spend that $ at though.
I think one of the most common sources of confusion about economics these days is not drawing the line between a market corrupted by some price-fixing cartel, and a free market where actual competition takes place.
Lots of people just assume collusion in all markets. I think that’s a cartoonishly simplistic view of the world, but you gotta remember lots of people assume “capitalism” refers to the thing better called “a price fixing cartel”.
They will, but then there are landlords who can jack up prices for no reason and you’ll pay them because you don’t want to be homeless. Landlords win, everyone else loses.
Disclosure: I don’t have an econ degree either
I don’t think that mechanism you’re referring to automatically finds its new equilibrium right back where you started.
Let’s take rent for instance. All the current renters in lowest income bracket now have $1000/mo more to spend.
Next income bracket up now has $800 more to spend. Not because the UBI is varying, but because the tax people are paying into the UBI is varying. So this next bracket up is putting $200 into it as taxes and getting their $1000 check. At a certain point, there are the people who break even. And above that, people are paying more into the system than they’re getting back. That’s worth mentioning.
But focusing on this lowest income bracket as if it’s a little segmented, separate economy. Like a slice, to analyze it.
Town with 100 people. Let’s say there’s 105 units of housing, making for a teeny bit of pressure on landlords via competition. The landlords live elsewhere; ultra simple model here. Each of the 100 people gets $1000 more to spend. Fuck it, all they’re spending it on is rent. It’s the only thing they have to buy.
Well, there’s still competition between the landlords. If a landlord’s got an empty unit, he can offer it for $200 less than the other guy and get a tenant in there. Excess supply is good for consumer negotiating power.
But also, let’s say all units just go up by $1000/mo, and swallow up the UBI.
Then other developers now have a new equation in terms of the costs and benefits of building new housing.
Maybe now that you can charge $1500 for an apartment instead of $500, it’s worth it to build a new apartment building. It’s become more profitable.
So someone builds a new apartment building, and there’s 120 housing units for those 100 renters. Now you’ve got 20 desperate landlords (or one landlord with 20 un-rented units) willing to take say $1000 instead of $1500.
That pushes the price of rent back down.
Of course it doesn’t actually sway wildly like this. Every player thinks ahead about all the moves that can be made.
Like if your apartment building is profitable at $1500 but not at $500, what’s the cutoff? Maybe if rents drop below $1200 your new apartment building is going to lose money.
There’s some equilibrium point, and that’s what the market price settles into, as people finding themselves far from that point find it profitable to move toward it. (You make more money renting out five units at $1000 than you make renting out two units at $1500 - lowering the price is profitable here).
So now to crack this model open again, what is this “other place” where these landlords are coming from to invest new money in housing?
That’s where we bring in the higher income tiers, the ones who pay more into UBI than they receive out. The money is coming from up there. In those places, the people have less money than they did before, and so it is becoming less profitable to fulfill their needs. Maybe the amount you can get for a luxury apartment in manhattan drops from $50k to $49k per month.
Ultimately, resources used to fulfill demands, get slowly and steadily re-allocated to serve money’s new center of gravity, which is slightly lower than before.
Prices go up for poor people goods, but not enough to eat all the income. And the new amount of money flowing improves the offering, even at the same price levels, by bringing more investment overall into those industries.
Yeah there’s that, then there’s this:
There is also a lobbying effort behind it. We can’t ignore that economists continue to argue for bank bailouts and against welfare programs.
Economists that mainstream media chooses to focus on, that is
I don’t think so. Seen a bunch of studies on it and pretty much no economist backs student loan amnesty while all of them backed the bank bailouts.
Even sent a few emails out to a few and they all confirmed that they did hold these two positions.
Plus you have an entire lobbying company that provides rent-economists for subcommittee hearings. You pay them, they get an economist to testify under oath that the policy you want is the best policy.
economist
I haven’t a fuck to give about the opinion of some Ivy-leaguer whose entire inheritance depends on the status quo and stealing the labor of the working classes.
Getting money from the government is like the one thing that’s classy to do if rich, but considered tacky if poor.
If it needs bailing out, it is not too big to fail.
Then it needs to he nationalized if it fails.
Yeah, gonna agree with this one 100%. That shit’s dumb.
If governments had paid to cover mortgages instead of just hand outs to major corporations the GFC would not have been so bad.
How about we stop spending so much money. The US is already in $36 Trillion dollars of dept.
We could easily pay the debt down by taxing millionaires/billionaires appropriately. Or, since it’s totally fine for a country to run a deficit, invest it back in to infrastructure and climate reinforcement.
What if I were to tell you that one of the points of a UBI is to replace welfare programs?
A “universal basic income” shouldn’t be a thing. It encourages laziness and is more government spending which can worsen inflation.
Welfare for corps is cool though
As long as it isn’t forced
Other than all the proof from places that have tried pilot programs that it actually improves productivity, and the fact that government spending only increases inflation if they’re, you know, making inflation with a money printer.
Anything else you feel like being wrong about today?
The US is already in $36 Trillion dollars of dept.
People have said, “the U.S. is already ___ dollars of debt” my entire 46 years as if that means something. What does it mean? Sometimes the economy goes up, sometimes the economy goes down. Debt keeps going up. It doesn’t seem to be changing anything.
That debt means nothing on its own. Correctly managed debt is a great way to earn a lot of money.
Do neither and lower my taxes
Only if it can get lowered into the negative
It’s funny how people don’t realize this is the actual solution and are downvoting. In reality lowering taxes for everyone achieves the exact same thing. Yet people would rather have a set of money each month given to them, despite the incredible bureaucracy that it requires, with it probably eating up 30% of the funds then.
How does this work for the disabled, the partially disabled, those who can barely get by on low income etc? Honestly we’d be better off with universal healthcare and removing employers from the health insurance system. They often pay tens of thousands of dollars in premiums, and the employees still have to pay premiums often.
That would give companies way more freedom to hire, less incentive to force near full-time part time jobs, and would allow people the freedom to move from job to job without any effect on medical services. The companies may very well not pay more. Plus the government would have the buying power to essentially price fix most medication and care.
Edit, addition:
This will never work though because of profit incentives. If I’m CEO of a fortune 500 I’m going to do absolutely whatever it takes to be profitable, and more profitable each quarter. Literally the legal obligation of a publicly traded company. It’s a fiduciary duty under law. When most of the investment is top 0.1% plus other publicly traded corporations and private equity firms the people will never benefit proportionally. Even well of working class tech workers making bank, really aren’t when you look at how little they actually have of the overall pie. If taxes go down for me, yeah I’d have more money to spend, so everyone has more money to spend, but 30% of crumbs are still crumbs, plus we lose a bunch of social services and things like Medicare and Medicaid which are already essentially damage control. Fundamentally, the incentives determine the outcomes. Capitalism, especially or current chrony implementation, is fundamentally tied to incentives that benefit wealth accumulation at the top.
Maybe… Do both? Lower the taxes and give stipends for the disabled and those who can barely hold their income? So those same people can buy things cheaper?
I agree, UBI is silly to discuss until universal healthcare is achieved.
No it’s not, the money you have monthly might be the same for a lot. But there’s a big differences psychologically and socially, that you don’t have to work just to survive. I can quit my job without having to fear how I’ll survive. I can decide to get further education without having to think about how I’ll do that financially (at least in Europe). Etc.
It’s very big difference compared to just lowering taxes (granted we’re not talking about negative income tax which may indeed result in the same thing as UBI).
Let’s just have 0% taxes! Then everyone will be rich!
No one’s road will get paved and their house fires won’t get put out, but lowering taxes is the solution, so eliminating them altogether must be the ultimate way to lift everyone out of poverty!
Yeah so instead of paving the road and putting out fires, let’s give everyone universal income, so that they can do both themselves.
Weird that they can manage to do all three in Alaska.
It probably costs much more money for a government to do UBI in the long term.
Not when you factor in the productivity and social harmony of a healthy citizen population.
Until by the next year rent has universally increased by the UBI.
I’m fully in favor of UBI, but unless we can get a government that will actually crack down on price gouging all it will do is funnel right back to the crooks at the top.
Have to start somewhere, and starting with ubi is a lot better then the crooked system in place now.
I’d be fine with starting with it, though people seeing prices rise right after will be really disheartening. I’d rather start with actual legislation to punish price gouging. These companies posting record profits while the rest of us struggle more and more is absurd, and I would want to root out that greed first so any UBI can actually help the people at the bottom.
Of course, I don’t expect the American government to do either of these things. Three Republicans will call it the work of Satan or something crazy like that and the Democrats will say they’re all for it until they actually have the means to do it, then suddenly it’ll be too much to handle.
Yea, just start them. People are so conservative that doing anything different from the status quo scares them, but once we have social policies in place, people like them. Libraries, national parks, paved roads, garbage trucks, conservatives fought against every positive social policy, medicare, but then appreciated them once they were enacted.
I don’t mind people possibly being surprised at inflation if their basic financial expenses are covered.
We haven’t tried it yet, it works as expected in all the trials so far, just do it.
The mechanics of sensible ubi are straightforward: enough money or money/housing to ensure survival, public education, pay more to those who contribute more to society.
Nothing is perfect, but ensuring the health of the population and investing in their success is a much better model for progress and growth than the ridiculous she damaging disparity the states is investing in at the moment.
We need public universal medical with no private option in order to create full price regulation of medical, we don’t want the government doing any more than we have to have them do though, because of corruption and lack of input from the populass. (Well almost no real input) We need the military budget and all the wasteful spending on secretive spy programs and BS to go away. Minimize or dissolve the NSA for example, and direct all that money towards social services, accountability, and a UBI or something near it. With AI exponentially progressing we might want more of a giant divided. Then everyone’s wealth could potentially skyrocket in unison, without the top heavy distribution. So really what I’m saying is we need to own the means of production collectively. Lol
Hope you’re right then. I really wanna see UBI implemented, I’m just worrying it will backfire.
Multiple UBI tests have shown that giving people money on a regular basis lifts them out of poverty and puts more money into the local economy.
And yet I can understand the skepticism and fear. We have not had yet a big scale “experiment” (i.e. a whole country implementing it). It will have bigger yet to resolve implications (e.g. what’s the effect on migration etc.).
(And I’m a big proponent of UBI)
But I think it’s just a matter of time that this will become reality, we’re to rich (in the western world) to fiddle around with “annoyances” like poor people, and I strongly believe that it will increase creativity, innovation and thus also GDP which may be probably the biggest argument for policy makers.
