3 ms·

Net positive how? How do you measure that, when you take into account oil companies and banks for example?

dsacco 9y ago
Banks are a net positive. Without them we have no modern economy. Occasionally the economy destabalizes as part of a cycle, but it (historically) restabalizes. The media pays an outsized lens to the corruption of Big Banks, but without their basic activity many modern quality of life improvements would be infeasible.
- bhaak 9y ago
  The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? I'm not convinced that we can't have the former without the latter. But that would mean limiting the latter and there is not much political will to do so.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    > The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? Implicit in this question is the idea that the destabilizing effects are actually a large amount of the banking activity. I would argue they are not, we just hear about that far more often because it's bad news, and bad news is more interesting. The rote, mundane functionality of all banks, including the big ones, is mostly under the radar and (in my opinion) vastly underappreciated with respect to banks' occasional tendency to throw the system out of whack. In particular, I would posit that the latter is more a manifestation of common economic activity than it is to a centralized and consolidated banking infrastructure. Or, more succinctly, that economic activity at the modern scale does not sustain itself without these banks working more or less as they do now. There are certainly improvements to be made, for sure. But I personally discount the possibility that those improvements would radically reshape banking infrastructure or significantly reduce the volatility cycle we encounter every decade or two.

Banks are a net positive. Without them we have no modern economy. Occasionally the economy destabalizes as part of a cycle, but it (historically) restabalizes. The media pays an outsized lens to the corruption of Big Banks, but without their basic activity many modern quality of life improvements would be infeasible.

bhaak 9y ago
The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? I'm not convinced that we can't have the former without the latter. But that would mean limiting the latter and there is not much political will to do so.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > The question here is can't we have banks that fulfill their basic functionality without the corrupting and destabilizing effects of the big banks? Implicit in this question is the idea that the destabilizing effects are actually a large amount of the banking activity. I would argue they are not, we just hear about that far more often because it's bad news, and bad news is more interesting. The rote, mundane functionality of all banks, including the big ones, is mostly under the radar and (in my opinion) vastly underappreciated with respect to banks' occasional tendency to throw the system out of whack. In particular, I would posit that the latter is more a manifestation of common economic activity than it is to a centralized and consolidated banking infrastructure. Or, more succinctly, that economic activity at the modern scale does not sustain itself without these banks working more or less as they do now. There are certainly improvements to be made, for sure. But I personally discount the possibility that those improvements would radically reshape banking infrastructure or significantly reduce the volatility cycle we encounter every decade or two.