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Comment by iambvk | Hacker News Reader

What is ~2017 VC-land crash in your opinion? Specifically, who loses money? How would it effect common-man who is not involved in stock market directly?

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People whose pensions are invested in VC funds would lose money. Don't forget that VC money comes in a large part from pension funds.

But do pension funds actually have that much invested in that asset class? Around $48 billion went into VC in 2014 but in the US alone there is $18 trillion in pension assets.

Good point. But, a crash will lower the historical experience thus lowering future expectations for market yields. For pensions that need to hit a defined amount in the future, this means that have to come up with more capital in the present to hit the future target.

I think that it will be local in its impact. We're probably not going to see it hurt the wider market. Bankers will have a laugh at Sand Hill's expense. The few pension funds that got substantially invested in VC will be hurt, but I think most Vanguard accounts will be fine.

Sand Hill Road will lose money. The leading VCs will still be rich, just less so. Very high-end California real estate will crash. Unfortunately, it probably won't do much for SF apartments; what we see in real estate is that people hoard (even at significant financial loss) rather than selling when real estate demand drops, because of emotional attachment.

What made Silicon Valley great in the 1970s-90s will reconstitute itself somewhere else in the 2020s: possibly the Pacific Northwest, possibly the North (Midwest and New England) again, and possibly another country.

2017 is a very approximate date. That could easily be off by five years, or even more.

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