Bankruptcies are exploding across the economy | Hacker News Reader

Bankruptcies are exploding across the economy

businessinsider.com

Theory is that highly skilled people (e.g. capable of creating functioning business) are too valuable for big corporations. They are building their own wealth, instead of corporate shareholder's. Governments in the West are lobbied to crush SMEs and force small business owners into corporate slavery. Once you no longer can run your own business and run out of money, you will have no choice but accept a job at corporations for peanuts.

The other parallel to what you describe is that the shift of populations from rural, agricultural areas to citys, is over in the west, no more strong healthy polite civilised people with strong work ethics, who knew that hard work would pay off, and they could have a house and 3 or 4 kids and buy a bunch of the shiny stuff in the magazines and there kids could go to college, work at the plant and get a gold watch, precisely what my grandfather did, and millions of others. But starting in the 1980's there were not enough men to do those jobs, so those plants were offshored to cheap plentiful labour countrys. But there were still enough farm boys to take the higher payed jobs IN the citys, and do trade work, but the wealth dwindled, and there kids have zero interest in busting there knuckles, and so skilled, self starting,enthusiastic,labour, is gone. My personal experience is that I will show up to do an estimate for something for a larger company, and before I can even get to look at it, they are suggesting that I "could get on with them" Many franchise companys ,"franchisese"?, are from familys that used to own and operate companys in the same business, under there own names, but those situations are now also gone, with very very few people growing up in the family business anymore. So it's down to money people and advertisers, trying to puppet clueless jobby job kids into running serious businesses for nothing. what could go wrong?

In wealth management there is a saying ‘the first generation builds it, the second generation protects it, the third generation smokes it’.

I’ve seen it play out. It certainly isn’t universal, but it’s a common pattern.

What you are describing also lines up (roughly) with generational demographic trends from the post WW2 generations to now.

Notably, the post WW2 USA was in a very unique place - most everyone else’s economies had been blown to smithereens, it had the worlds reserve currency as everyone else had to take loans from the USA to survive (or had been conquered), and it had a (mostly intact) highly motivated and trained workforce that had just won the major world war as ‘the good guys’ and had a relatively consistent self-image and cohesive society because of it.

All of these factors - including even a cohesive society, have now mostly ‘gone up in smoke’. Even major Capital has devolved to equity and leverage, typically the weakest type of Capital.

Don’t worry, there is still a lot left to burn though!

Another hypothesis:

Also on the front page right now is something about postmodernist deconstruction, where it's asserted that decades of academics talking to academics for validation have created an inbred dialect of jargon which is incomprehensible to almost everyone and doesn't mean a whole lot (though it does have meaning). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405288

Could it not simply be that the control structures of our economy also spent too long chasing validation from each other, developing an inbred language and inbred success metrics, instead of objectively-measured value creation?

In fact globally-recognized money forces even people who recognize this is a bad system to still participate in it and chase inbred success metrics instead of actual value creation. It turns subjective metrics into actual wealth. It doesn't matter that you created a semiconductor fab in your garage - the person who convinced the right people they were about to create AGI got a lot more money - enough to buy a real semiconductor fab.

reminds me of a story called “a disneynand without children” about a planet overtaken by AI pursuing meaningless “inbred” GDP goals and completely neglecting the humans in the process https://open.substack.com/pub/nosetgauge/p/a-disneyland-with...

I think it's a silly conspiracy, but, even if it were, this kind of supression would not be possible to be done by the corporations themselves. They're simply too big and too incompetent because of the org overhead to orchestrate such a thing. The state being co opted on the other hand might be capable of doing this on their behalf. I could believe that. (but I don't it's just silly)

My personal theory is that one of the (key?) reasons the USA doesn’t have affordable universal healthcare is that it keeps most people tethered to Big Inc.

If you remove the incentive from Big Inc’s healthcare benefits, work at such places is far less appealing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and agree.

Also, it’s amazing how inefficient medium+ businesses are. I think we should see small businesses thriving due to the cost/weight of the bureaucracy they inflict on themselves, but we don’t.

I think healthcare costs/requirements and unfair access to capital keep the inefficient machine chugging along, cutting off routes for smart people to start businesses, innovate, and improve our economy.

This is one of the manifestations of Crony Capitalism. That is, manipulation (i.e., typically regulation) that puts its thumb on the scale and picks winners and losers.

Most people who complain about capitalism are actually complaining about Crony Capitalism. The fact that they don’t understand the difference\+* is what makes CC so “magical.”

** The NFL is not the Premier League, and vice versa. Both play football, yet no one would confuse the two. Capitalism and Crony Capitalism should have the same differentiation and clarity. The reason they do not is not accidental.

Capitalism evolves into Crony Capitalism just as Communism evolves into Dictatorship and Tyranny, Feudalism evolves into Serfdom, etc. I'm just surprised it lasted this long...

conspiracy ? a flawed term.. I can tell you that 50 years ago in coastal California the proportion of Big Box retail to ordinary small business was vastly different; so different that you would not tend to believe it. The top 10 massive retailers did not exist, and thousands upon thousands of "small business" were operating. Not only "radio repair" or "clothe yardage stores" either.. I mean many of the same goods and services that are now commonly purchased via massive chain corporate stores.

Secondly, the flow of cheap plastic things from China turned into a steady stream of more and more sophisticated, and low priced, goods.. replacing things that were brand names, hand made, or niche markets. Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband Richard Blum were particularly involved in that change fyi.

Lastly for now, the newspapers and media landscape. Books, magazines and daily newspapers.. immensely and unimaginably at the time, gone.

Technology plus boomers.. "like a pig through a boa constrictor" .. what is left is this headline. It is not only in the USA.

> a flawed term

No, just misrepresented.

Conspiracies happen daily.

> Secondly, the flow of cheap plastic things from China turned into a steady stream of more and more sophisticated, and low priced, goods.. replacing things that were brand names, hand made, or niche markets. Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband Richard Blum were particularly involved in that change fyi.

More commonly attributed to the administration of President Bill Clinton.

Let Quantitative Tightening run off the Fed balance sheets entirely and see what happens with bankruptcies and the economy more generally. With the amount of money created over the past few decades, it's difficult to know how much of the economic activity is just Govt debt spending. If you compare this to the total amount of debt created in that time and the percent of GDP to service the debt, much less create more to sustain the system, it will all come crashing down.

Never underestimate the Govts ability to kick the can down the road and delay the inevitable.

The article implies it's a mystery, but to me the cause is pretty obvious:

Some businesses and consumers had spending patterns that were only viable due to ZIRP, COVID stimulus, and QE. The resulting inflation spike followed by QT and interest rate hikes to fight it led to the current slowdown.

It's almost as if doubling the number of dollars in existence between 2020-2022 had some negative long-term consequences...

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

Claire's was mentioned as one of the bankruptcies, and surely their business model would have been affected by tariffs

Couple of other contributions:

Tariffs all over the place.

Many billions going into AI data centers leaving less for normal businesses.

So you reach back to 2022 for the problems cited in 2025? I guess nothing else happened this year that could affect the economy. Nope, nothing.

I, for one, am pleased that the economic crisis Trump's 'policies' have put into motion is appearing to begin in ernest during Trump's term.

USA voters don't get a lot of immediate feedback to their votes, so this should be educational.

Yup

Evidently, the requirement for democracy in the US to survive is for the people who failed to vote for the only viable alternative to Trumpism must feel the suffering they are happy to visit on others, and so recognize that voting for "my team" incompetence is a bad idea.

The suffering is only beginning. It takes an insanely long time for large systems to show effects of bad decisions. Usually the party that has wrecked the economy in every presidency for the last 50 years benefits from the lag and the party of recovery gets blamed, putting the wrecking party back in power. Perhaps this round of the wrecking party will be too effective, and blame will go where it belongs.

Here's some of the other submissions by the OP:

"As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary", " Bankruptcies soar as companies grapple with inflation, tariffs", "Apollo cuts risk and stockpiles cash in preparation for market turmoil", "The Private-Credit Party Turns Ugly for Individual Investors", "Stock Market Crash Is Here: How Bad Can It Get?", "Investors seek protection from risk of AI debt bust", "Oracle Credit Risk Gauge Deteriorates After Earnings Report", etc, etc, etc.

Wow, look at that. An account that overwhemingly only post doomer scare mongering anti-US economy stories. Surely just a normal human posting normal stories that hackers would find interesting, and there's no other motive behind their posting pattern at all.

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