The reason employees are anxious about their next pay checks is because of the VC-induced panic which is entirely self-serving and has not one iota to do with making payroll — that’s just a palatable hand-wavey justification for demanding government intervention because their precious points are at risk.
I have a great deal of empathy for the workers anxious about being paid, but that goes without saying, there’s nothing to discuss there. Workers are victims of the VCs who rightly deserve to be derided for their behaviour, both in this incident and more broadly in squeezing every last drop of profit from normal people.
I don’t understand what you’re asking of people on HN. Are you asking us to preface all our comments with “…not all SVB customers are leeches…”?
I also think that people here are missing the game that was played by the VCs. I have a friend working at Insight who told me that they were preparing to issue loans and further funding to portfolio companies. This of course is less ideal than having the government bail their portfolio out, but they would have had no choice. So, having shot themselves in the foot by starting a panic, they decided that the best way to avoid getting in trouble was to push the panic even further to the point that it threatened the entire economic system.
Personally, that is what I find so disgusting and that is the source of my animosity. I believe the fed ultimately chose to maximize the probability of avoiding a crisis over punishing these morons. I think that is wise but still not good.
The analogy I choose is this. Imagine there is a forest that is due for a bit of a natural fire. We should let it burn - but wait it turns out some people built and sold houses in this forest. Instead of evacuating and having these people suffer and need to relocate, we put out the fire. Since we put out this fire, these people living in a hazardous way continue to do so. Eventually a massive fire will start and kill those people and spread to other areas that it otherwise would not have. All because we decided to stop the “maintenance” fire from clearing the brush.
I have a great deal of empathy for the workers anxious about being paid, but that goes without saying, there’s nothing to discuss there. Workers are victims of the VCs who rightly deserve to be derided for their behaviour, both in this incident and more broadly in squeezing every last drop of profit from normal people.
I don’t understand what you’re asking of people on HN. Are you asking us to preface all our comments with “…not all SVB customers are leeches…”?