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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Any hope of a bailout for AI or data centers vaporized last night. If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.

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Good. That's how America's free market is supposed to work.

Thats the only good thing to come out of this. The rest of it really highlights how we acrewed up violating personal liberty with overly agressive zoning and other regulation.

Why do you say that? TARP was extremely unpopular yet still happened.

People cared about TARP because these were companies managing their retirements and banks holding their savings. They had been around for 100 years+ and many had branches in their hometown.

Very few people know, or care, about AI companies in any way.

If AI companies go bust so will those retirements accounts (and the economy) So I think it is likely that AI companies will be bailed out when the bubble bursts.

I guess the lesson multinationals learned from the 2008 financial crisis is that if you fail is better to fail really really really big.

Tech stocks, and stocks in general, are overwhelmingly held by wealthy people who are way more exposed to crash than working class folks. The median retiree is much more reliant on social security and safe investments than they are on NASDAQ. Even if a few big tech companies go to zero it will only have a modest impact on their finances.

Obviously there would be knock on effects of a major crash that are hard to predict, but people inside the AI bubble wildly overrate how invested most Americans are in their success.

yes, happened under both a red and blue administration. It was the perfect example to show that political party is meaningless when it comes to financial bailouts.

Very different situation. Banks failing en-mass is very different than some VCs, private credit speculators, and AI bros losing their shirts.

Never underestimate the willingness of politicians to vote for pork.

> If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.

That's how things should work. Bailouts are socialism for corporations.

Democrats have participated in previous bailouts, I don't see why they wouldn't participate in this one. Especially given that the "it" in your "let it burn" scenario isn't AI companies, it's the economy.

thats called free market capitalism...

Not at all. The reasonable democrats will be forced to clean this mess (and Iran) while spending their newly found political capital and pissing off their base.

AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.

And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.

Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.

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