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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

"Banks get bailed out" seems to be a feature for stability of systems (counterargument: "Let all the banks fail" would have been helpful for what part of society?)

There is of course the very legitimate argument of bailing out homeowners (banks still get their money and people get to actually be in houses), but letting the pieces fall where they may is extreme orthodoxy when the real world is at stake. And of course the crypto ecosystem has shown this pragmatism so many times now when basically forking off to other things to reverse unwanted transactions.

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Yeah, let's privatize the gains and socialize the losses because the banks are too big to fail. What a great system! But hey, at least it's stable.

Didn't say we should privatize the gains. I just don't think that it's useful to tear down a bunch of infrastructure on principle. I would not have minded just nationalizing as much as would have been needed either. And of course bailing out a bunch of homeowners would be extremely ideal.

Gov't intervention when systems are falling apart are not a bad thing (well, at least when they actually do helpful things).

The bank bailouts were ultimately profitable for the US government. Banks paid back the loans with interest.

https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/news/companies/government-b...

15.3B in profit on 426B investment is 3.6% yield, and that's over 6 years. US inflation alone between 2008 and 2014 was about 10%.

Most of the commentary about the 2008 bank bailouts presumes all the money was spent or given to banks. Banks paid everything back. A couple billion dollars in opportunity cost because of inflation is definitely worth preventing a collapse of the financial system.

Yes, but you insisted that the loans were profitable, not that they had "a couple billion dollars in opportunity cost". There is a difference between profit and loss.

They were profitable. They collected more money than they lent out on a dollar to dollar basis.

You’re describing as profitable lending by an entity funding itself by issuing Treasuries and then ignoring the cost of the interest paid on those Treasuries when deciding if the use of the money was profitable.

Inflation is not a direct cost of interest. If we are going to included opportunity costs in the definition of profit and loss, then we should include the opportunity cost of tax revenue plummeting if the financial system collapsed.

It’s not inflation. It’s literal money paid out via the government paying interest on its debt obligations (which were higher as a result of the bailout money than they otherwise would have been).

I agree that they should have done what they did. I do not agree that it was net profitable.

"Guys, we would actually have been richer instead of poorer if six years worth of inflation hadn't happened! Let's celebrate!"

If I can buy n units of goods and services for the money before the investment and n-1 units of goods and services after the investment, I've lost. I don't see how the particular numbers you print on currency enter the equation. How is nominal profit at all interesting?

How is the bank bailout materially different than the Eth fork?

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