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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
Corporate greed always existed. Thus, it is not the one that triggered inflation.
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.
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
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.
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.
With obesity being a big problem, we could always frame UBI as being for individuals too big to fail as well.
