It’s good that it’s being discussed. We’re tired of the wealth class privatizing the profits and leaving us to cover the costs.
So there will be a huge pressure. Trump Jr. and the Kushners are invested in all sorts of bubbly assets, too.
The Democrats should do this however, and if they win the midterms keep their promises for once and block everything. Then 2028 is easy.
Promises in the wind.
b) if an AI bubble burst were to happen, the fallout would be severe, ie. hard to abstain for policy makers from giving the public ease of mind
c) All this proposal wants is to drive a wrench between the GOP and its new (?) populist voters, that don't want any favors given to any Big Tech oligarchs, regardless of it being AI or not.
d) this may work or not – neither party is going to abstain from bailing them out, anyways.
In the 2008/2009 crisis the bailouts were approved by a red admin (Bush) and then the check signed, delivered hat in hand, by a blue admin (Obama). If they want a bailout they will get a bailout no matter which party is in charge.
if you are reading this, please do some research on how much money inference prints? its not wildly spoken about because people don’t yap about printing money.
“Oh but it’ll all come crashing down” - say you don’t work at a lab or know anyone at a lab.
My greater annoyance is HN becoming annoying political in the past few years. Sure, everything is political now but the moderation siloed these posts better. Maybe the user base is too old now. Fresh blood went to Discord or X.
The only company making money are hardware manufacturers who are throwing logs on to keep the fire burning through direct capital investments in their customers. Without Nvidia some of these neoclouds would already have failed.
If AI companies were to go bankrupt, it’s possible they’d be nationalized. I don’t see any other feasible option besides that or a bailout (or one but it’s effectively the other, e.g. “nationalized” but the employees including leaders are the same, or bailed out but already subservient to the military). I think the best case is for the compute to be made effectively public: giving every citizen free access, since we’re paying taxes that prevent their bankruptcy.
Check out this excellent article for more background: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/bubble-bailout-tru...
However, looking at the other side, I think what this might do is add some barrier or consideration when a bailout is considered.
The last time we did large scale bailouts (TARP[0], in 2008), It was rushed through and ratified in around two weeks following the sudden collapse of Lehman.
Any measures we can take to ensure that we don't fall into a situation where there is only one choice is sensible.
[0] https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-assets-relief-progra...
It’s a resolution. Pure puffery. A serious effort would have involved floating a bill.
If you're lucky enough to be in this field and you're not managing your finances, that's not the governments problem to fix
There are no good answers here. But pointing fingers and assigning blame is for sure one of the worst ways to do the analysis.
Either way, it's more efficient to give whatever money to bail out individuals/consumers than to bail out rent seeking organizations
Bailing out banks made some sense so that they couldn't operate. Without the bailout there would be no more banks and a hundred million of people left on the ice.
If you want to keep AI operating you can just (temporarily?) ban investors from tearing down the AI companies they invested in for parts. You could say they are important for national security or something. I'm sure they are already earning enough to keep the lights on. Just not enout to give investors payback for insate capital expediture to set up.
Such ban wolud the governement zero, especially if you write the law well enough, so that it can't be succesfully challenged in court.
theandrewbailey•1h ago
Signed, the Silent Majority
techblueberry•1h ago
I worry that one of the reasons that Anthropic has 500 billion in commitments and everyone is running to the credit markets is to make it so that if they fail everyone suffers.
bluGill•55m ago
AnimalMuppet•50m ago
JumpCrisscross•49m ago
Who are you thinking of?
That’s what happened in 2023. In 2008, depositors almost got wiped out and a lot of senior managers and stockholders got bailouts.
AnimalMuppet•7m ago
At NetBank? Only if they were over the FDIC limit. Stockholders got destroyed, though.
At Bear Stearns? No, depositors got protected in a convoluted deal. The shareholders got very close to nothing.
At Lehman Brothers? They did "break the buck" on money market funds for a bit, but weren't depositors made whole? And weren't stock owners wiped out in the bankruptcy?
Washington Mutual? Depositors were covered by the FDIC.
Where were depositors "almost wiped out"? Where specifically? Where were stockholders bailed out?
JumpCrisscross•50m ago
That’s what happened in 2023.
vinyl7•49m ago
driverdan•41m ago
JumpCrisscross•27m ago
Ever is a stretch. Government shouldn’t be bailing out shareholders and senior managers.
whatthejesus•31m ago
theandrewbailey•25m ago
jerf•30m ago
What makes this so politically unpalatable is that having constantly bailed out the last few cycles, everyone is now operating on the assumption that they will be bailed out, so many entities who in a more perfect world would know better have done a lot of stupid things, like pensions that have a lot of bonds that will go bad if the AI bubble collapses.
Frankly we're looking at massive problems and upheaval at this point no matter what we do. But the advantage of not socializing the losses is that the signals of what needs to be changed go directly into the economy. Socializing the losses means that the signals get muted, confused, and mangled and people in the future end up doing the wrong things as a result.
Unfortunately, at this point I think the choice is between people clearly and forthrightly losing massive portions of their retirement as visible losses, or people deceptively losing massive portions of their retirement as the bailout creates massive inflation and their retirement is inflated until it has a fairly similar amount of losses. Unfortunately, it is a feature for the rulers that the bailouts obscure the losses and dampen the correct apportionment of blame, even as it destroys the underlying economy. Giving people clear, correct targets for their rage, the same process of correct pain apportionment the economy needs to become healthy again, would point people at the "wrong" clear, correct targets, and the clear, correct targets are the ones deciding whether or not a bailout occurs. Not just the literal lawmakers nominally making the call, but the entire system that makes the decision.
So plan on bailouts.
bryanlarsen•52m ago
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. If you owe the bank $100 billion, that's country's problem.
etempleton•39m ago
aeon_ai•27m ago
yifanl•14m ago
cicko•3m ago
eloisius•7m ago
rtkwe•4m ago
woodpanel•41m ago
Isn't that what the IPOs are for?
tovej•27m ago
Telemakhos•18m ago
thesmtsolver2•14m ago
4chandaily•6m ago
Now that I think about it, it would seem this may also apply to witches.
zardo•14m ago
Iolaum•12m ago
Also funny enough - AAPL is siting on 62B$ cash according to google search.
braiamp
ImPostingOnHN•3m ago