Obviously, it's impossible to determine the effect of any one action on the economy -- but if this $85b prevents the markets from crashing, I'd argue its money well "spent." U.S. market cap has already fallen $4t in the past year. Do you really want to risk losing considerably more?
You're ignoring the question of whether or not the market should crash. If stocks are overpriced, then intervention like this just means we'll spend more time acting as if they are not overpriced, and that would be awful.
For what it's worth, my day job and my main part-time job are both entirely dependent on the market, so I sure hope the market doesn't need to crash. I agree with David Einhorn (who, by the way, has been short Lehman for a while): the stock market is okay, but the credit market is way overpriced.
You don't think the Fanny bailout "worked"? We don't have the luxury of seeing what would have happened if we hadn't bailed them out.
To make the pro-bailout argument more clear, here is one reputable economist predicting that if we had let the FMs default, the dollar would drop about 30% and unemployment would double, in about a week.
So it would be like a 19th-century panic/recession, without hard money. He's omitting the part where, since we aren't subsidizing stupid decisions, stupid decisions don't get made and the economy recovers very quickly.
Just to clarify, I meant that the other course might result in much more massive decline than has already happened. Think 22 sigma level -- like the '87 crash. Bailing out distressed financial firms is almost expected now. Thus, if it doesn't happen, then a lot of market participants may reevaluate their choice to invest in firms with heavy debt.
Obviously, these bail outs have their costs, such as the value of money lent as well as increased moral hazard, but it's worth considering whether this is worth the potential cost of a market collapse to the whole economy.
In the short term the lack of credit availability could dent manufacturers, but those businesses that make real things that people want should be ok if they can survive until credit is again available to their customers.
because they are part of an integrated economy. where will google's advertizers find their ad budgets in a stagnant economy? boeing is no different. would these firms be as adversely impacted as wamu? no. but everyone suffers.
but if this $85b prevents the markets from crashing
it won't. this loan doesn't unwind the terrible decisions aig (and others) made, nor the hedges they tied to those decisions, and the hedges they tied to those hedges, and the hedges they tied to those hedges.
the derivatives unwind cannot be stopped short of a repudiation of all global currencies. the amount of leveraged capital in hedge deals is still north of $100 trillion. no one has the money to pay that out. it would be easier just to erase the USD dollar than to circulate $100 trillion in new fiat wealth...the effect would be the same anyway...worthless dollar
Just have one text field for the url you want to shorten. When the user clicks submit, then give two urls. One is the shortened url, the other is for analytics. Make the analytics url publicly accessible and have a button on that page to make it private -- for a cost!
One major problem with this article is that it confounds content-based sites with the web. Just a quick sampling of Alexa's Top 100 Sites for about 10 random countries indicates that Google, MSN, and Yahoo (or their localized versions) are frequently among the top ten most visited. So there are in fact some truly global sites on these here interwebs.
What types of site vary the most between countries? Sites that produce content, like newspapers, all-in-one portals, and video sites.
Maybe the problem with Hulu and Pandora isn't just their complex licensing agreements, but also the content that they license. Anyone been to karaoke bars in Asia that are popular among youth? Guess what? Only about one-tenth to one-third of the content is in English. Look hard enough, like mechanical_fish suggests and you'll find plenty of similar sites (some even identical) in other countries.
I think the concern is that HTTPS is necessary, but not sufficient for security. If you use HTTPS on your site, but send cookies without the secure flag, then it is possible for someone to trick the user into acquiring (or otherwise obtain) standard HTTP content. Setting the secure flag requires that all content sent relative to the cookie be from HTTPS. Hopefully, that makes some sense.
Even though this article is brimming with hyperbole, it brings up a number of important points that are often glossed over by many readers of HN. These include:
1) For most entrepreneurs, the present value of expected personal profit from a startup is probably less than that from a salary at a big tech company -- or even less so than from on Wall Street.
2) Luck begets success in entrepreneurship. Sure, it requires hard work and some intelligence, but obviously there are far more smart and hard working people than people who started public companies. Perhaps the function should be "(success) = (hard work) * (intelligence) * (luck),” where hard work and intelligence = 0 or 1 and luck is any real number.
3) Many tech bloggers and journalists are writing about things in which they don't have expertise. It's commonly cited among the academics whom I’ve met that expertise requires 10+ years in a field. Many of these people are in their 20s. Something doesn't add up. Moreover, many experienced people extrapolate their previous lessons to situations that are too broad or not directly parallel.
If our start up works, it will primarily be due to luck and timing.
I certainly agree with points 1, 2, and 3, but I think you're forgetting a very important point: many of us are doing startups because we love the environment and type of work.
We wake up every day excited to work on TicketStumbler. Sure you have bad days or even rough weeks, but overall I'm much happier than I've ever been at a more formalized job. I think the last formalized job Tom had was "grocery bagger" so I can't really speak for him.
This certainly doesn't apply to everyone at a startup, but it applies to a lot of us.
