59percentmore

T-minus 1.5 years to Angelic Layer/MMBN.

That's fair, but I think you're again conflating trust in the overarching institution with trust in its current constituents.

This is important because it exposes the needle you have to thread: messaging that makes clear that you're intentionally throwing out the old banks and companies (or their leadership) in order to preserve their prosocial functionality without their antisocial dysfunction. People who are happy to see Goldman Sach burn still want a way to safeguard their money; people who want Mark Zuckerberg to pay the piper don't necessarily want to lose their Instagram galleries or Facebook connections.

The people who run these companies want us to believe that a collapse of the status quo is a total collapse, but it's not. And a government that facilitates transition of ownership and leadership to more capable hands doesn't have to follow the oligarch playbook; different ownership models and transition processes exist.

I'll give an example. Consider people living in a corporation-owned apartment complex. The company collapses - most such corporate landlords collapse - and maybe the bank holding the loan does too. There is no world in which the complex sells at its previous value, and there is probably a temptation to facilitate some transaction, any transaction, that would bring things back to order by designating a concrete owner. Of course, there are people living in the complex, and God knows what happens to them when God knows whoever shows up claiming rights to the units.

Or.

The government steps in. They claim eminent domain and set aside reasonable funds to pay whoever turns out to be the final previous owner. A co-op is formed and ownership is transferred to the current residents as a subsidy; they now own the units they previously rented. Their lives are not disrupted by forced eviction; the municipality is not disrupted by an explosion of homelessness. The main losers are the old owners and banks, and they're bankrupt and dissolved anyway. Life goes on.

I'm not saying that it's an easy transition. Russia showed us how to screw it up. But the successful scenario is a far better outcome for far more people than throwing our hands up, exclaiming that we don't know how to do anything without letting vulture capitalists have their way, and inviting them in to freely carry out the exact scenario (which continues to distort markets and makes the next reckoning all the worse) which is the failure mode of the above proposal anyway.

I don't think this characterizes the situation accurately. The economy doesn't cease to exist, it moves out of the existing financial system. Able-bodied workers, supplies, equipment, knowledge all still exist, they're just awaiting orders. You have your choice of how to spur productivity with the extant resources, including direct investment and propaganda. Many people credit WWII for the recovery, but it was actually just those two things, with the war as the excuse. But you can do it without a war, as with the Japanese economic miracle: some amount of austerity, everyone works towards a common goal, the government backstops the effort. Bonus: no golden parahute overhead.

I think we screwed up after 2008 and I would like to see us get it right this time. The government absolutely should be hands-on, but the focus should be on raw productivity and public well-being, not making certain that certain firms survive the bloodbath.

You know what's a great economic stimulus? You now own the house you owe a mortgage on, clear and free. "But that would bankrupt the mortgage-holding bank!" Okay.

Colloquially, I do feel that "Wall Street" is strongly associated with the banking system that people touch regularly, and not boutique funds and offices that they've never heard of. Might be a jargon issue.

>The primary reason we don't do that isn't upper middle class people demanding a status quo in their own interest -- it isn't in their interest.

I never said it was. They think it is, though, and fight cash payments tooth and nail. People don't vote in their economic self-interest when it involves new and unusual policies that they perceive as an attack. There are a lot more of them voting than there are billionaires, and they contribute quite a bit to efforts to keep things the way they are. I think breaking the pact six figure earners have with people making much more is crucial to restructuring the economy to work for people who aren't elite wealth-holders.

>It isn't about the source of the money. Converting those things to a UBI would cost less money to give people more money

We're talking about two different things. You want benefit reform. I want benefit reform, and forced distribution of productivity gains to labor, and heavy structural impediments to outsize personal wealth. You say "unintended consequences" when you I think you mean "undesirable consequences", but the funny thing is that they're both intended and desirable. Let's go back to an exec's lifestyle being tied to his job because he can't extract a huge paycheck without being taxed heavily. Please, take your money and inflate a foreign economy instead of spending it to buy elections here (if you manage to get it past the IRS).

Are you claiming that the DIF wasn't touched in the process of handling the collapse of SVB, Signature, and First Republic?

Are you further claiming that large commercial banks don't have depositors?

I'd expect them to give "trusted partners" first dibs. You know, firms that can warehouse the chips and keep prices high. Gotta protect NVDA at all costs. I'd love to be proven wrong.

What would have happened if we hadn't? What was the doomsday scenario? And, crucially, what would have happened next?

Plan on them trying bailouts. Every inch of us should resist.

We've been living in an economy distorted by the forces that lead us to this point. We've been locked into the decisions necessary to keep things going as they have been, whether or not they make sense.

The correction that you're talking about frees us to actually make choices. Some of them will be tough choices, but we finally get to make them, with all of our resources and work ethic intact, which don't just disappear because a stock index craters.

If we want trains and local farms instead of data centers and new iPhones, we can actually make that choice, instead of being forced into the latter because every investment fund is pumping them to the point of being a foregone conclusion.

To borrow an aphorism: the bust is a feature, not a bug.

No, it is not. The way the SVB et al. collapse was handled was highly unusual. FDIC guaranteed deposits in excess of the insurance cap, bailing out (wealthy tech and VC) depositors to the tune of 30%ish of the fund set aside for such purposes. The Treasury stood up a new facility to prevent contagion to other banks.

You cannot do this if the big Wall Street firms collapse.

The problem isn't that we don't know how (solved issue: UBI, higher pay for less work, high marginal income tax rate, unrealized capital gains tax above a minimum, land tax, etc.).

The problem isn't even the billionaires.

The problem is convincing comfortable, ambitious middle-high earners to put a cap on their and their bosses' prospects in exchange for the stability (and subsequent ground preparation for innovation) of a higher floor.

They're the stumbling block because they're the ones who, on balance and en masse, have the money and votng power to excuse and enable the status quo.

>You expect them to find a person they (or someone powerful) doesn't like, and find a crime to suit.

I expect investigators to follow up on reasonable suspicion, which is what unusual market events or behavior should arouse. The crime and the perpetrator are found at the same time, because one can't exist without the other, legally speaking; to start with a definitive crime is to assume guilt, which, as you say, is incorrect. You triangulate on the crime-perpetrator (think space-time); this, of course, means that you must investigate people who are merely suspected of committing a crime. Some will be wholly innocent. Some will present evidence of crime other than the one you initially suspected; you should pursue that, too, in the interests of justice.

Speak only for yourself, please.

>How exactly do you tell the difference between the trader who fleeces millions and the trader who is simply good at their job and makes an equivalent amount of money?

Most tyrants don't believe they're actually tyrants.

The point of an efficient market is that it's difficult to beat, and the difficulty increases exponentially. Unless you cheat.

This is the goal of every productivity gain from the worker's side, and owners failing to deliver for long enough inevitably results in revolution (usually after some demand-destroying crisis).

What you call an illusion is reality, and the notion that it's an illusion is absurd.

Google seems to think so.

Big picture: look at the growth of M2 and the national debt. Effectively, everyone is taking money they don't have to invest in random companies. And investment in "random companies" would probably have a better chance of breaking even than investing in Anthropic.