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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine , 15 years ago (ios 3), already predicted that the only reason why apple would stash that amount of cash was if they planned on turning into a bank.

Hats off to you, my friend !

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I said the same thing, and I'm going to do one more prediction: the banking business will become more and more profitable with very low risk to the point it will take more and more space in Apple's culture.

Also, regulations and the hiring market mean they will have to hire more and more profiles than you typically find in finance. With Jobs dead and an aging Cook that can't willpower himself into everything anymore, nothing will cancel this effect.

Eventually, this will lower Apple taste for innovation and the product quality will go down until they become another average player cashing in on the inertia of its past success.

They will be super profitable, but nobody will look up to them anymore.

The financial sector is so absurdly profitable that it makes sense for big companies with a lot of cash to just invest in financial markets rather than actually do things (esp. considering taxpayers will bail you out on tail events, so don't you care about risk!). Famously GM in 2008 had virtually become a financial services company which made cars on the side.

Just another sign that all is not well with the state of things.

I've heard descriptions of large housebuilders in the UK that sound similar - actually building houses is difficult and tricky because you have to actually keep end customers reasonably happy whereas much easier to just treat the land you own in "land banks" as speculative assets and base your business mainly around trading those.

It seems like they did not plan turning into a bank because that would be introducing annoying regulations - but the regulators turned them into a bank.

At a certain size every company becomes a bank. Once a company can do its own banking like things it doesn’t make sense to pay anyone else. It’s somewhat like rich people who can self insure.

Like Ticketmaster? Aren't they just a cash holding business? You buy a ticket for a concert 18 months in the future, they hold the cash doing whatever to preserve it and grow it, then settle up with all interested parties 18 months later?

Car makers are the classic example. Why ship all that loan business to a bank, when they could be the bank.

IDK who gets paid when from TM, but if they start offering people the ability to buy tickets on TM credit - yeah, bank.

No, I I think it’s the opposite.

There is some threshold of financial assets after which there is nothing to do but become a bank.

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