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Comment by dadoge | Hacker News Reader

Good. They were massively over leveraged.

I hope they don’t get bailed out by tax payers.

Any customers with accounts should be free to withdraw, but please don’t let the company operate if they were acting recklessly

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The problem is a problem of networks. Let's say CS are insolvent, if they do go bust, then the problem is you then need to figure out all the creditors and pay them in order. It's possible you could do that eventually, and everyone else is solvent. But firstly, lots of CS counter parties are going to collapse whilst you just figure out who you're going to pay. Secondly, it's quite likely that some of the counter parties you're defaulting against are therefore themselves insolvent. But thirdly, it doesn't matter, because the market is going to go mad dropping anyone who could possibly be a counter party to CS (because CS can't pay), the result being a further collapse and contagion to other banks. So sure, you can say that customers should be allowed to withdraw, but that's not a practical solution. You're saying "I think the first people in the run on the bank should get paid".

The real problem is that this became clear in 2007, and nothing was really done to fix it.

That’s well and good but the result should be that bail out happening as an investment on fair market value (in this case, borderline bankruptcy value) - and now the tax payer owns that firm (perhaps sold off asap at a profit for the tax payer).

If you’re taking bail out dollars, you give up equity just like any other investment to save you. An eminent domain of sorts. Of course, all the usual criminal and civil charges for wrongdoing.

The point being: getting a bailout should be a terrible situation for the company too, there should be no incentive to play so riskily expecting that bailout to save you - if it comes, you might as well have gone under anyways, the result for you as an executive should be the same, but the externalities of firms that are too big to fail are mitigated

I think you should look into what actually happened with the bank bailouts. In the UK the government took ownership stakes in both RBS and HBOS, in the US the government took equity in AIG. The US government actually made $20Bn profit from that deal in the end. The money the US loaned to banks under TARP actually got paid back with interest, netting the US Gov a profit on that as well. These bailout programmes also came with executive pay restrictions. The regulations on bank stability since then are the reason why lots of banks are struggling to make money (they simply can't make money the ways they used to).

I know that people wanted the bankers to suffer for the damage they caused. And yes, there was a complete failure to actually criminally or civilly pursue the people responsible. Yes that was bad. But the 2008 bailouts were actually incredibly effective, and wiping out shareholders would largely have just robbed pension funds.

It's not about "hope", it's about what is possible/will happen, in this case I don't think there is the room for governments to manoeuver anymore, i.e. they can't bail out the banks without creating 10-50x worse of the exact inflation they're trying to fight. Some may argue these governments can simply continue the exercise of holding the private banks on their own balance sheets such as in the case of Japan owning most of the issued bonds, but that comes with its own set of consequences, Japan has been stuck in stagnation and a "silent depression" (to borrow Emil Kalinowski's term) for the last 30 years. I don't think that is going to wash this time.

> Japan has been stuck in stagnation and a "silent depression"

I think that's what's in store for us here in Europe anyway.

We have no reasonable young workforce anymore (in term of numbers, that is), the competitive advantage provided by cheap Russian energy is gone forever, we didn't really get on the IT bandwagon, or, more exactly we slipped off it by the late 2000s (I'd say), the euro is not the world reserve currency and I could add some more. I honestly fail to see how Europe can avoid Japan's fate when it comes to its economy.

Hasn’t Europe already experienced its lost decade?

It’s barely begun.

That’s fair.

But I wouldn’t fully rule out a bail out…look at the crazy policy of UK cutting taxes recently

The problem is this could be a 'Lehman Brothers Moment": the financial system is deeply interconnected. Credit Suisse failing could cause a domino effect that will spread to other banks, creating a systemic risk to the entire economy.

I'm seriously starting to think that we might need to accept the systematic risk realising and clean up the table after it crashes. Extremely ugly, but pushing it forward only makes it worse and I don't think there is fixing things anymore...

I'm tired of outsized banker bonuses and socialized losses. Cleaning out the disease allows for new owners to step in. Take out some cash money for some bills, and let's get started with the cleanup.

Given how Switzerland operates, it seems impossible to imagine to me that they wouldn't bail them out. Switzerland would be a developing country without their banking sector

Nestle, Novartis, Roche...

Their capital ratio is 13,5%, I wouldn't call that overleveraged. What are you basing that statement on?

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