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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

These companies are blowing through an incomparable amount of resources. If their bravado is misplaced, the economic impacts will be far more significant.

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How so? Most of these companies will take a hit but will be fine Alphabet, Amazon, Google, etc can write off their entire investments in AI and will be a-OK. The pure AI companies will obviously be dead.

This is what people said about the banks in 2007. Just because the big players’ balance sheets can take the hit doesn’t mean the wider economy is insulated.

Exactly. The below reply to you also says the banks were bailed out. "So people were right".

How so? Big corps got home safe. Not the people. People committed suicides and lost their livelyhoods.

And all these banks were bailed out by big brother. So the people were right.

A) they still screwed the economy and everyone in it except themselves. B) Nobody gives a shit about the banks as businesses. They got bailed out because they physically made much of the world’s economy function, like plumbing. That’s not going to happen here.

You're still ignoring their mention of the wider economy. The banks were bailed out, but everyone downstream of them still felt the brunt of the impact, atop paying for that bailout with tax dollars.

Yeah and a lot of far less powerful people got fucked over from the crash. Is that what a successful, functioning economy looks like to you?

All of those companies will be fine, but they are currently valued on the stock market for future earnings. Investors anticipate them making a lot more money in the future. So stocks will slide dramatically. Open AI and Anthropic might not survive. And suddenly you see a 20-50% pull back on stocks. That impacts retirement and pension funds. It may trigger a panic and sell off across sectors.

Hah, none of the big companies are going to write off their entire investment. They will come begging for bailouts.

Privatize Profits and Socialize Losses is now Bog-Standard Operating Procedure.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/18/is-ai-a-bubble-1997-or-1999-w...

The stock market. Stocks crash, companies go belly-up, tons of people get laid off, unemployment spikes, people die. I don’t give a shit about the companies themselves. I do give a shit about who they employ, both directly and downstream, and the job market that will result from many of them losing their jobs.

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