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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Do the hoi polloi care that the pariahs of the world are leaving and taking their lifestyles with them? These are the people who cause housing bubbles, their subsequent crashes, construction booms and crashes (Spain) Deutsche Bank holding Greek economy hostage, etc.

I get it, they are a necessary ungood thing for the economies, but should the hoi polloi cry for them?

But that's Bloomberg caring about the capitalists who would arbitrage your job in a heartbeat.

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Banking is a pox on both our houses, but it's probably still preferable to have them in your city. Some of the money suck out off the real economy does end up with local business, after all. Like tailors, coke dealers, and prostitutes.

Many of my friends work in the classical music scene in London, which is one of the foremost in the world. With the banks is going a lot of the money for this sort of thing, and not just the big ticket stuff - the community outreach programmes and local festivals are usually first against the wall. It's a tragedy that will take years if not decades to recover from, but given how fucked everything else is too it's not getting much press.

So, that was a scene that was on life support by banks.

Either the society has to decide it wants classical music as a protected cultural good (and e.g. put it in government grants and subsidies) or the masses should (and e.g. pay for concerts and stuff).

Apart from those things, I don't see it as any great tragedy for something that's neither of them to lose its bank-derived financing.

In your logic "life support by banks" = "pay for concerts and stuff". The dimension you are missing is spatial, in that this would now happen elsewhere from London, and the "externality" of non-banker Londerners being able to experience this, is the negative effect referred to by the OP.

>In your logic "life support by banks" = "pay for concerts and stuff".

No, in my logic there are two distinct things: the public paying for concerts (and the public not caring) vs the public caring and supporting them itself.

In the first case, it's just the banks buying some prestige by playing to supposed upper middle class preferences, and get some free publicity plus some tax exceptions for those sponsorships.

>The dimension you are missing is spatial, in that this would now happen elsewhere from London, and the "externality" of non-banker Londerners being able to experience this, is the negative effect referred to by the OP.

So? If the Londoners didn't care for those events enough to support them themselves in the first place, why would they have a problem now that foreigners, and not themselves, will get to "experience" those?

No Classical music makes money, it does not support itself anywhere. It is a charitable cause.

Banks do it, because high-paid workers want to live in a culturally rich city. That's also why cities invest in operas, it raises tax income. Same in Frankfurt. Cities, banks and the general public have the same interests here. Once the banks leave, the general public and the city loses.

Yes, of course. Sorry for the cheap cliché about bankers, when they, both as customers and through their firms' support do indeed support many worthy causes. I hope the cultural scene in London won't be hit too hard–they must have been among the strongest supporters of continued EU membership, considering how international it is.

Maybe rent prices at least drop a bit to compensate. Or Britain&The EU find a way out of this misery once the consequences sink in.

Housing bubbles are caused by people getting loans they can't support, and the incentives aligned so that the people approving the loans don't care whether the borrower is able to pay it or not.

It's a good example of a problem that government regulation should solve. A market doesn't always regulate itself.

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