Hacker News Reader

Comment by wewtyflakes | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that I agree with the author's assessment that this is "disgusting"; it just seems like a shift in wealth from bankers to commercial real estate companies, and I am not particularly sympathetic to either. Maybe there is another angle here.

View on HN

Maybe you missed the part about a bail out. That's not a transfer of wealth from bankers to commercial real estate companies, it's a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the real estate companies.

Wouldn't the government be taking an ownership stake in the banks at the banks' reduced market cap? How does the taxpayer lose out in this scenario?

What if there isn't positive equity left in the banks? What about opportunity cost? The money for the bail out likely needs to be borrowed, what about inflation and anemic economic growth due to interest costs?

Good point regarding potential negative equity, I hadn't considered that.

The government is in a unique position to take over the properties and convert them to public housing. We have a way to administer it. Between FHA and DOD, they operate more residential units and than any private firm. This ensures housing stays affordable rather than just handing money to billionaires.

I also came here to comment on that word choice. It's disgusting to activate a clause of a contract that both parties agreed to, when neither party seems to have a substantial power imbalance relative to the other? Seems pretty odd to me.

I think I could say that it's disgusting if you view it as a mafialike group getting ready to cause a financial shock for their own gain to the detriment of everyone else...

But that's a hyper specific view point that I doubt many hold, but I feel like that's the view the author has.

That's not the disgusting part. It's the assumption by banks that they will be bailed out (by us) for their bad investments if the investments are large enough.

And even more disgusting that taxpayers and their elected representatives keep allowing this to happen over and over again. There is no accountability.

The author mentioned how the US government will have no choice but to bail out the banks. That’s the part they considered disgusting.

Ye. Just sounds like a deal where the bank takes the risk. I guess the interest rate was higher from the get go due to this.

…but the big banks don't actually lose wealth, given their blank check from the government.

Losses cause crunches elsewhere, via the taxing/printing/managed-decay policies which buy the banks an unlimited number of get-out-of-bad-decisions-free options.

Who finally pays is left as an exercise for the reader, both figuratively & literally.

Do you really think bankers are lending their own money here? They’re lending yours and mine

But if the bank fails, the bank owners get wiped out.

But banks keep using the leverage of gigantic – but not fully admitted/accounted-for – de facto government subsidies to make destructively-reckless bets out of proportion to the nominal "bank owners" capital-at-risk.

So even if "the bank fails", there's been destructive speculative misallocation whose social costs can be far larger the nominal owners' losses.

Of course, the government also doesn't let the "systemically important banks" fail - so related politically-mobbed up interests don't even get "wiped out".

Did you read the article carefully?

The disgusting part is where taxpayers make the banks whole for their commercial real estate losses! It is a multi-billion taxpayer bailout of private corporations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com