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Comment by LordOfWolves | Hacker News Reader

This sounds a bit similar to - and just as ludicrous as - American taxpayers financially assisting or “bailing out” massive companies which were/are so bad at cash flow management that their runway was/is only 1-3 months, despite hundreds of millions - if not billions - in annual revenue and a varying chunk of that being profit.

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>massive companies which were/are so bad at cash flow management that their runway was/is only 1-3 months

Is this considered odd? These are established companies, not startups. They don't need months or years of runway.

>despite hundreds of millions - if not billions - in annual revenue and a varying chunk of that being profit

I'm not sure why millions/billions in revenue is a relevant metric here. If they operate on razor thin margins, they're going down either way.

> They don't need months or years of runway.

Isn't that only because bailouts are available for unforseen hardships that would otherwise require a runway?

MBAs strategically weaken businesses with debt instruments so they aren't "leaving money on the table". We shouldn't be excusing this sort of behavior. Businesses schools need to start teaching their acolytes about planning for a future more than three months away. Everyone wants to look like Apple with a juiced vanity stock price but they won't squirrel away the cash needed to survive a rainy day.

Business schools teach what will be relevant on the job. If large corporate bankruptcies were an issue, MBA programs would teach it.

Funny how you can also use that exact sentence to say business schools are bad at teaching.

So ... the business equivalent of "Generals are always fighting the last war"?

I'm sympathetic to this view. It doesn't seem very efficient to have businesses compete on whether they can predict major disasters. That means some of them will be unprofitable most of the time, and then have a monopoly once their day comes.

OTOH, you also don't want businesses to be/look profitable simply by running on super short runways while high on debt. There are all kinds of non-black-swan things that they need to anticipate riding out if they want to be solid businesses. The culture of running on that model (as the neighboring comments note) needs to die.

A middle ground might be to just require businesses to contribute to a common "rainy day fund" that activates whenever the government has to fight a major disaster, and, as public policy, bans entire businesses.

But then, I don't see a major economic/financial difference between that, and just paying unemployment/bailouts out of general tax revenue. The only difference would be "who bears the burden" -- but it's not much a difference, given that disasters affect the whole economy at once, and most everyone is thus affected.

I'm not advocating a position -- not in this comment, anyway -- just wanted to give an overview of the dynamics.

>They don't need months or years of runway.

Obviously they do if they're demanding bailouts. That's three times in the last 20 years that the federal government has had to bail out "too big to fail" businesses... airlines in 2001, banks/automakers in 2008, and everything in 2020.

Like mbrameld said, the only reason they don't have runway is because the government will bail them out.

If the federal government is actually the implicit insurer of these companies, then the federal government should be collecting premiums.

They just buy politicians, which is cheaper than premiums would be.

That would be corporate taxes, and in fact at least some people are asking if maybe we need to roll back the recent corporate tax cuts.

They absolutely should have runway and understand the risk they are taking when investing in companies with negative margins and hedge their bets early.

If they know the government will bail them out in the end, they can continue to freely burn money at the expense of the Japanese people.

American taxpayers invest their 401k money into american stock market, and they vote with their money for such companies. I'm against bailouts on libertarian principles, but if you're going to do bailouts at all, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't bailout these companies.

(And, every time bailouts are mentioned, I have to notice that it's not free money, it's loans, with interests, and 2008 bailout have actually made money for american taxpayers in the end. May be not as much money as other investments would, but it also had a nice side effect of saving american (and probably world) economy from even worse disaster).

Edit: OK, I was wroung about free money, by bad. But when the 2008 bailour is mentioned, I feel that most people discussing it still think of it as some sort of handout.

That's not exactly true this time. The airlines, for instance, are getting about $35 billion in outright grants, and $15 billion in loans and warrants equal to 10% of the total.

The large part of it is free money, and many major US airlines have been the worst offenders at financial engineering, spending the large part of their free cash flow on stock buybacks, and running the business on razor margins.

The loans are forgiveable if used for salaries and rent and interest on existing debt, as long as you hire back or keep 90% of your staff at 90% of wages.

So any company can say that they used 100% of the money to pay for the approved things for 8 weeks, and that amount of money is forgiven.

Most of the loan is like free money to most companies.

No, the 2008 recession saw Fed Quantitiative easing put in $4.6T in money that was never paid back to outright buy assets off of banks at full value. People only get told about TARP which was a temporary loan, but the vast magnitude of bailout was around the QE buyouts.

Almost half of Americans don't have any retirement savings at all, not to mention 401ks.

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