zlacker

>>giveme+(OP)
In general I would rather the government take a stake in corporations they're bailing out. I think the "too big to fail" bailouts in the past should have come with more of a cost for the business, so on one hand I'm glad this is finally happening.

On the other hand, I wish it were a more formalized process rather than this politicized "our president made a deal to save america!" / "Intel is back and the government is investing BUY INTEL SHARES" media event. These things should follow a strict set of rules and processes so investors and companies know what to expect. These kind of deals should be boring, not a media event.

>>jjcm+Ef
If a company has truly become too big to fail that it makes sense for the federal government to bail them out, then why are we even leaving the welfare of the company up to private industry in the first place? It's just asking for ways to siphon taxpayer money out of the government through their willingness to buy shares. It inflates the stock price because it shows that the government might buy more share in the future at market rate. Its operations should be required to be more transparency, since if they're large enough that their failure would dramatically impact the welfare of the whole country, their operations should be subject to more direct democratic will (at least, more direct than the many steps removed from what is happening to Intel).

>>treyd+cm
Intel is public and their financials have indicated this would happen. Even at my most irrationally exuberant their stock buybacks didn’t make much sense.

I’m not sure what “more transparency would look like to you, but publicly traded companies with audited financials are quite transparent. As for the part about siphoning money, history has shown that taxpayers do well. In 2008, the US government took roughly 80% of AIG, sold off their stock by 2012, made a roughly $15 billion profit and AIG is no longer considered too big to fail. It worked and did what it was intended to do. There are reasons to be positive about this.

>>hluska+In
Don't forget that the US government took roughly 80% of AIG in a move that was later declared illegal and made a roughly $15 billion profit.