12 ms·

The United States of Bed Bath & Beyond

184 points by colinprince 3y ago

happytoexplain 3y ago
>Tony advises against it, but eventually agrees, staking Davey with $50,000 for the game. What does "staking with" mean here? It sounds like "loaning", but I've never heard this phrase.
- sparky_z 3y ago
  Poker-specific term. In one sense it's a loan, but really it's more like "investing" in a player, giving them the money they don't have to buy into a game ("table stakes") in exchange for a percentage of their winnings.
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    That makes sense. "To stake" as in "to provide (another person) with stakes". Like "to water".
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      I've often heard it used to mean buying a player's buy-in, in return for (hopefully) a percentage of their winnings. Often there's no obligation to pay the staker back in the event of a loss, but in the case of a large stake to a mobster, maybe it's a different story
- bloggie 3y ago
  Staking, the present participle of stake, which means a wager, bet, or pledge. Tony is loaning Davey the money, but specifically to use as a wager, or stake, so it is Tony that is staking.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  The amount you’re playing with is called your “stake”. (Same root as “proof of stake” in crypto.) You might stake another player (loan them the money and collect interest/vigorish). In modern high-stakes poker, you might also “buy a piece” of a player where they put up half and you put up half and split the win/loss (or have another split).
- fineIllregister 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_stakes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_stakes
woodruffw 3y ago
This article comes across as a narrative in search of a justifying story: it could just have easily used a 1980s example of corporate raiding instead (or deceptive advertisement of pink sheet stocks to consumer investors, etc.) This, however, wouldn't allow the author to tell a reactionary "just so" story about our feckless and greedy rulers. One wonders.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I read it as both This has been happening non stop since the 70s and the current state of America shows the results of 50 years of breakneck capitalism What you’re seeing is that at this point it’s so entrenched that people can look at it and shrug instead of being horrified that instead of being a rare situation it’s “Business as usual” Everyone should be horrified
  - blq10 3y ago
    Breakneck capitalism, so to speak is why I can get almost any material , consumer or professional, delivered to my door in a few days - including things that would be considered exotic a year ago, at a tenth the price they would have been (even adjusting for col). Corporate raiding is nothing new, and financialization does let it happen at a pace that it couldn't previously - but just saying "but that's capitalism!" is quitting Worker owned collectives have the same problems, people want to acquire power and then use it to be ahead when strategies fail and someone has to take responsibility. How do you prevent that looks different in a market economy than a planned one (planned ones having more widespread but also more small scale corruption issues like these) - but you still do need to do the work to prevent it.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      It's nice that you can get things. But there's a cost - increasingly large numbers of people can't. I'm sure as the game continues you won't become one of them. IMO the real problem is that maybe 5% of the population are amoral sociopaths, and being absolutely heartless and uncaring - often with a liking for outright abuse and violence - gives them a competitive edge in almost any political and social system you can imagine. Normal people just can't imagine that another human might operate like this. But worse - many people seem to have some kind of bizarre deferential herd instinct to follow these crazies off the suicide cliff. It may not be a fixable problem. We're a flawed species. Perhaps it won't be long before evolution - the ultimate owner of the casino - shrugs and moves on.
jmye 3y ago
Interesting and unsurprising to read about Cohen’s role, and the intent to take advantage of the low-information meme investors. Weird to read how far some folks will go to defend Cohen, though - it reads like a sort of cognitive dissonance.
- j4yav 3y ago
  Nobody wants to believe they've been made a fool
- dirtwolf22 3y ago
  'low-information meme investors'. Unfortunately, true for many. Would be great if the CFTC would revert the financial reporting requirements for bank swap dealers (https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8746-23 https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8746-23). Specifically: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/23.105 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/23.105 As for 'defend Cohen', He wrote a letter to the board specifically calling out the company’s executive compensation structure as noted in the article. They ignored him. He held through a 50% loss then when finally profitable filed his paperwork to sell. Any informed investor looking at the fundamentals would know the risk of this vs just reacting to noise on social media.
Ozzie_osman 3y ago
Bust out 1 and 2 are basically the Private Equity playbook. Buy a company, take on debt, buy-back stock. If possible, extract extra fees. There's a book called Plunder that does a great job going into more detail on this model.
- fisherjeff 3y ago
  Yeah, this is just debt recapitalization. And it can totally work! But it often (usually?) backfires spectacularly.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > But it often (usually?) backfires spectacularly. Indeed, with oftentimes massive cost to creditors (banks, employees, vendors, landlords, unemployment insurance schemes, taxpayers). I wonder why such schemes haven't been banned yet, or what kind of catastrophe it needs to push regulators into action.
eigen 3y ago
> As I write this note, the common stock of a no-longer-functionally-bankrupt-but-now-formally-bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond trades at $0.17 per share. in the 4 months since May 16, BBBY has lost another 50% and closed a $0.08 today.
yellowstuff 3y ago
“Bust Out 1” seems basically OK to me. Everyone hates stock buybacks, but they’re economically very similar to dividends, and seem like a reasonable way for a fading company to return cash to shareholders. Could BBB have survived if they spent $4B on a new initiative instead of returning it to shareholders? I doubt it. “Bust Out 3” seems pretty sleazy, selling stock in a failed company to retail investors. But hey, that’s what they said about Hertz, so maybe there’s some universe where this could have worked out OK? I agree “Bust Out 2” was just a scam. Ryan Cohen is a grifter.
- xhrpost 3y ago
  > return cash to shareholders I think the highlight here is that the buybacks were funded by debt. They're not "returning" anything.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    Actually it’s not okay. You’re basically making money for investors who are “in on it” at the moment at the expense of future investors and other large investors who are just in the stock as a result of big fund diversification. My retirement money could be funding the sleazy stock sales from the insiders while they sell out the company.
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    When interest rates are low, a rational corporation will want to be funded in large part by debt.
    - actionablefiber 3y ago
      Borrowing money to buy back stock is the opposite of funding: it's de-funding. It's the acquisition of liabilities with no offsetting acquisition of assets or future cash flows.
      - nradov 3y ago
        So what? It's just a change in capital structure. Most corporations are funded by a mix of equity and debt. On average, taking on some debt boosts shareholder returns despite the increased risk of bankruptcy.
1024core 3y ago
Didn't BBBY's CFO commit suicide sometime in August 2022?
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Yep https://www.reuters.com/business/bed-bath-beyond-cfos-death-ruled-suicide-2022-09-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/bed-bath-beyond-cfos-death-...
Animats 3y ago
See also Sears, Boeing...
- Maken 3y ago
  I'm kind of surprise about how the author extrapolate the BB&B situation to politics, when it's clearly the financial system crashing the economy because stock manipulation is somehow more profitable than doing actual business.
thaumaturgy 3y ago
The author's pivot to enlightened centrism at the end is an unfortunate miss where he might have instead argued that this example and all of the other broader institutional bust-outs he describes or alludes to are just natural, predictable consequences of unregulated capitalism. It's still an ideological position, but it's got a more solid footing than the political one. Reasonable people can disagree on the effects or values of different monetary policies under different political environments, but nobody can arrive at the view that they're the same without being pretty ignorant on the subject. "This is the nature of capitalism" [1] can become a discussion between sane people, vs., "there's a 70-year-long grand conspiracy to loot society and it's because men aren't men anymore", for which no charitable interpretation exists. Some people will be quick enough to point out that everything that happened in the BB&B case was completely legal, and maybe even right or correct to do under certain circumstances, that there shouldn't even be disagreement that this is the house capitalism builds. Under this system, some people can build a business (which may have some unfortunate side-effects in some communities or on the environment), and the same people or other people can come along and then loot the business for everything they can get away with, enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. At the moment, there are lots and lots of businesses that have ripened on the tree of capitalism, and there are lots of people with the skills and greed required to loot them. Sure, it sucks for consumers and the public [2], but how many times in history have they really had a say in how society should be run? [1]: Please don't misread this as an argument that other -isms are better. That's not an argument anyone can productively have on this website. [2]: Arguably. There are plenty of people that will counter-argue that society is actually better off when this sort of thing happens because, I dunno, people got cheap toasters or something.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  When you say that these businesses are being looted, what you mean is that their owners are being cashed out at an agreed-upon price.
  - metabagel 3y ago
    Cashing out by running a company into the ground is what we’re talking about here. The Tony Soprano “bust out” method.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
> At a large enough scale, the bust-out goes on forever. I don't think that's true. It didn't work for Louis XVI, it won't work for us. If you continually degrade the reasons to bother playing this game, eventually somebody will start playing a different one.
- ls612 3y ago
  Eh Louis XVI’s downfall still required a famine to kick it into gear. For all of its faults America won’t face famine anytime soon.
  - blkhawk 3y ago
    A lot of People already can't afford food in the US. You think the Potato Famine was caused by not enough food and not governmental / economic ineptitude? That is like arguing bullets kill people not guns.
    - maxwell 3y ago
      Sounds like the parent was referring to the Pacte de Famine and Flour War.
    - danaris 3y ago
      The potato famine (which had nothing to do with Louis XVI) wasn't even caused by ineptitude. It was caused by outright cruelty. Ireland had plenty of food at the time. It was just going to feed the English overlords. Potatoes were all that the Irish were allowed to keep, so when the blight hit, they starved.
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        Being cruel to the point where the farmers that feed you are dying is also ineptitude. Similar story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
sacnoradhq 3y ago
The perils of under-regulation, of regulatory capture, and the naivete of individual day-traders. There are no incentives to increase regulation, but there are incentives and inducements to look the other way and to par back the regulatory environment even further. Hell, one of LTCM is even getting airplay these days and saying how they really only made a tiny, correctable mistake but that they were completely right otherwise.
rpaddock 3y ago
Did anyone else start getting lots of BBB spam coupon messages in the last few weeks? I'm getting several a day. No BBB even close to my area to use such coupons, if they are by chance real.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Same. They came out of nowhere and now are thirsty AF. Prob related to their merger with Overstock.com.
  - tedajax 3y ago
    Not a merger, Overstock just bought the branding and the website.
    - nobleach 3y ago
      They didn't even buy the website. They reskinned their own website (dig around in the front-end code).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Octokiddie 3y ago
The premise of the piece depends on making a connection between BBY and the US. I'm not sure it works. > In the American context, my personal view is that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presided over Bust Out 1, Barack Obama orchestrated Bust Out 2, and Donald Trump kicked off the lulz period, which we are now squarely in. I mean, how can you understand Trump and Biden as anything other than lulz? Those BBY bust-outs were its leadership sucking the company dry. How did Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump suck the country dry? I'm not saying those leaders were effective but rather asking the more specific question about the connection between those administrations and the BBY serial vampire syndrome. The article seems to be saying that wealth/vitality was somehow sucked from the US into the leaders themselves or their cronies. If so, name names. Or at least offer a single example. Instead, the article ends up with a much less interesting message. The US is going down the tubes and has been for a long time. That's a very old idea that may go back to the country's founding. It doesn't offer new insights. It doesn't open new perspectives. It just riles people up for a time. It's the kind of thing that politicians looking for new slogans to congeal a base of support turn to in campaign speeches so they can portray themselves as the only one who can drain the swamp.
glonq 3y ago
Bright Sun Films did a very nice overview of the rise and fall of BB&B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armRWC8yI-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armRWC8yI-Y
javier_e06 3y ago
Greed Street, Rapacious Street, Wall Street. Is all the same. We all let our 401 fund managers do their dirty work for us while we dream of lofty retirements. For older folks, that lived through the .com bubble, savings and loans and too-big-to-fail, and so on, this article rings disingenuous.

184 points by colinprince 3y ago

>Tony advises against it, but eventually agrees, staking Davey with $50,000 for the game. What does "staking with" mean here? It sounds like "loaning", but I've never heard this phrase.

sparky_z 3y ago
Poker-specific term. In one sense it's a loan, but really it's more like "investing" in a player, giving them the money they don't have to buy into a game ("table stakes") in exchange for a percentage of their winnings.
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  That makes sense. "To stake" as in "to provide (another person) with stakes". Like "to water".
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    I've often heard it used to mean buying a player's buy-in, in return for (hopefully) a percentage of their winnings. Often there's no obligation to pay the staker back in the event of a loss, but in the case of a large stake to a mobster, maybe it's a different story
bloggie 3y ago
Staking, the present participle of stake, which means a wager, bet, or pledge. Tony is loaning Davey the money, but specifically to use as a wager, or stake, so it is Tony that is staking.
sokoloff 3y ago
The amount you’re playing with is called your “stake”. (Same root as “proof of stake” in crypto.) You might stake another player (loan them the money and collect interest/vigorish). In modern high-stakes poker, you might also “buy a piece” of a player where they put up half and you put up half and split the win/loss (or have another split).
fineIllregister 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_stakes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_stakes

woodruffw 3y ago

This article comes across as a narrative in search of a justifying story: it could just have easily used a 1980s example of corporate raiding instead (or deceptive advertisement of pink sheet stocks to consumer investors, etc.) This, however, wouldn't allow the author to tell a reactionary "just so" story about our feckless and greedy rulers. One wonders.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I read it as both This has been happening non stop since the 70s and the current state of America shows the results of 50 years of breakneck capitalism What you’re seeing is that at this point it’s so entrenched that people can look at it and shrug instead of being horrified that instead of being a rare situation it’s “Business as usual” Everyone should be horrified
- blq10 3y ago
  Breakneck capitalism, so to speak is why I can get almost any material , consumer or professional, delivered to my door in a few days - including things that would be considered exotic a year ago, at a tenth the price they would have been (even adjusting for col). Corporate raiding is nothing new, and financialization does let it happen at a pace that it couldn't previously - but just saying "but that's capitalism!" is quitting Worker owned collectives have the same problems, people want to acquire power and then use it to be ahead when strategies fail and someone has to take responsibility. How do you prevent that looks different in a market economy than a planned one (planned ones having more widespread but also more small scale corruption issues like these) - but you still do need to do the work to prevent it.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    It's nice that you can get things. But there's a cost - increasingly large numbers of people can't. I'm sure as the game continues you won't become one of them. IMO the real problem is that maybe 5% of the population are amoral sociopaths, and being absolutely heartless and uncaring - often with a liking for outright abuse and violence - gives them a competitive edge in almost any political and social system you can imagine. Normal people just can't imagine that another human might operate like this. But worse - many people seem to have some kind of bizarre deferential herd instinct to follow these crazies off the suicide cliff. It may not be a fixable problem. We're a flawed species. Perhaps it won't be long before evolution - the ultimate owner of the casino - shrugs and moves on.

jmye 3y ago

Interesting and unsurprising to read about Cohen’s role, and the intent to take advantage of the low-information meme investors. Weird to read how far some folks will go to defend Cohen, though - it reads like a sort of cognitive dissonance.

j4yav 3y ago
Nobody wants to believe they've been made a fool
dirtwolf22 3y ago
'low-information meme investors'. Unfortunately, true for many. Would be great if the CFTC would revert the financial reporting requirements for bank swap dealers (https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8746-23 https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8746-23). Specifically: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/23.105 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/23.105 As for 'defend Cohen', He wrote a letter to the board specifically calling out the company’s executive compensation structure as noted in the article. They ignored him. He held through a 50% loss then when finally profitable filed his paperwork to sell. Any informed investor looking at the fundamentals would know the risk of this vs just reacting to noise on social media.

Ozzie_osman 3y ago

Bust out 1 and 2 are basically the Private Equity playbook. Buy a company, take on debt, buy-back stock. If possible, extract extra fees. There's a book called Plunder that does a great job going into more detail on this model.

fisherjeff 3y ago
Yeah, this is just debt recapitalization. And it can totally work! But it often (usually?) backfires spectacularly.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > But it often (usually?) backfires spectacularly. Indeed, with oftentimes massive cost to creditors (banks, employees, vendors, landlords, unemployment insurance schemes, taxpayers). I wonder why such schemes haven't been banned yet, or what kind of catastrophe it needs to push regulators into action.

eigen 3y ago

> As I write this note, the common stock of a no-longer-functionally-bankrupt-but-now-formally-bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond trades at $0.17 per share. in the 4 months since May 16, BBBY has lost another 50% and closed a $0.08 today.

yellowstuff 3y ago

“Bust Out 1” seems basically OK to me. Everyone hates stock buybacks, but they’re economically very similar to dividends, and seem like a reasonable way for a fading company to return cash to shareholders. Could BBB have survived if they spent $4B on a new initiative instead of returning it to shareholders? I doubt it. “Bust Out 3” seems pretty sleazy, selling stock in a failed company to retail investors. But hey, that’s what they said about Hertz, so maybe there’s some universe where this could have worked out OK? I agree “Bust Out 2” was just a scam. Ryan Cohen is a grifter.

xhrpost 3y ago
> return cash to shareholders I think the highlight here is that the buybacks were funded by debt. They're not "returning" anything.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  Actually it’s not okay. You’re basically making money for investors who are “in on it” at the moment at the expense of future investors and other large investors who are just in the stock as a result of big fund diversification. My retirement money could be funding the sleazy stock sales from the insiders while they sell out the company.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  When interest rates are low, a rational corporation will want to be funded in large part by debt.
  - actionablefiber 3y ago
    Borrowing money to buy back stock is the opposite of funding: it's de-funding. It's the acquisition of liabilities with no offsetting acquisition of assets or future cash flows.
    - nradov 3y ago
      So what? It's just a change in capital structure. Most corporations are funded by a mix of equity and debt. On average, taking on some debt boosts shareholder returns despite the increased risk of bankruptcy.

1024core 3y ago

Didn't BBBY's CFO commit suicide sometime in August 2022?

anigbrowl 3y ago
Yep https://www.reuters.com/business/bed-bath-beyond-cfos-death-ruled-suicide-2022-09-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/bed-bath-beyond-cfos-death-...

Animats 3y ago

See also Sears, Boeing...

Maken 3y ago
I'm kind of surprise about how the author extrapolate the BB&B situation to politics, when it's clearly the financial system crashing the economy because stock manipulation is somehow more profitable than doing actual business.

thaumaturgy 3y ago

The author's pivot to enlightened centrism at the end is an unfortunate miss where he might have instead argued that this example and all of the other broader institutional bust-outs he describes or alludes to are just natural, predictable consequences of unregulated capitalism. It's still an ideological position, but it's got a more solid footing than the political one. Reasonable people can disagree on the effects or values of different monetary policies under different political environments, but nobody can arrive at the view that they're the same without being pretty ignorant on the subject. "This is the nature of capitalism" [1] can become a discussion between sane people, vs., "there's a 70-year-long grand conspiracy to loot society and it's because men aren't men anymore", for which no charitable interpretation exists. Some people will be quick enough to point out that everything that happened in the BB&B case was completely legal, and maybe even right or correct to do under certain circumstances, that there shouldn't even be disagreement that this is the house capitalism builds. Under this system, some people can build a business (which may have some unfortunate side-effects in some communities or on the environment), and the same people or other people can come along and then loot the business for everything they can get away with, enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. At the moment, there are lots and lots of businesses that have ripened on the tree of capitalism, and there are lots of people with the skills and greed required to loot them. Sure, it sucks for consumers and the public [2], but how many times in history have they really had a say in how society should be run? [1]: Please don't misread this as an argument that other -isms are better. That's not an argument anyone can productively have on this website. [2]: Arguably. There are plenty of people that will counter-argue that society is actually better off when this sort of thing happens because, I dunno, people got cheap toasters or something.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago
When you say that these businesses are being looted, what you mean is that their owners are being cashed out at an agreed-upon price.
- metabagel 3y ago
  Cashing out by running a company into the ground is what we’re talking about here. The Tony Soprano “bust out” method.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

> At a large enough scale, the bust-out goes on forever. I don't think that's true. It didn't work for Louis XVI, it won't work for us. If you continually degrade the reasons to bother playing this game, eventually somebody will start playing a different one.

ls612 3y ago
Eh Louis XVI’s downfall still required a famine to kick it into gear. For all of its faults America won’t face famine anytime soon.
- blkhawk 3y ago
  A lot of People already can't afford food in the US. You think the Potato Famine was caused by not enough food and not governmental / economic ineptitude? That is like arguing bullets kill people not guns.
  - maxwell 3y ago
    Sounds like the parent was referring to the Pacte de Famine and Flour War.
  - danaris 3y ago
    The potato famine (which had nothing to do with Louis XVI) wasn't even caused by ineptitude. It was caused by outright cruelty. Ireland had plenty of food at the time. It was just going to feed the English overlords. Potatoes were all that the Irish were allowed to keep, so when the blight hit, they starved.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Being cruel to the point where the farmers that feed you are dying is also ineptitude. Similar story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

sacnoradhq 3y ago

The perils of under-regulation, of regulatory capture, and the naivete of individual day-traders. There are no incentives to increase regulation, but there are incentives and inducements to look the other way and to par back the regulatory environment even further. Hell, one of LTCM is even getting airplay these days and saying how they really only made a tiny, correctable mistake but that they were completely right otherwise.

rpaddock 3y ago

Did anyone else start getting lots of BBB spam coupon messages in the last few weeks? I'm getting several a day. No BBB even close to my area to use such coupons, if they are by chance real.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Same. They came out of nowhere and now are thirsty AF. Prob related to their merger with Overstock.com.
- tedajax 3y ago
  Not a merger, Overstock just bought the branding and the website.
  - nobleach 3y ago
    They didn't even buy the website. They reskinned their own website (dig around in the front-end code).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Octokiddie 3y ago

The premise of the piece depends on making a connection between BBY and the US. I'm not sure it works. > In the American context, my personal view is that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presided over Bust Out 1, Barack Obama orchestrated Bust Out 2, and Donald Trump kicked off the lulz period, which we are now squarely in. I mean, how can you understand Trump and Biden as anything other than lulz? Those BBY bust-outs were its leadership sucking the company dry. How did Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump suck the country dry? I'm not saying those leaders were effective but rather asking the more specific question about the connection between those administrations and the BBY serial vampire syndrome. The article seems to be saying that wealth/vitality was somehow sucked from the US into the leaders themselves or their cronies. If so, name names. Or at least offer a single example. Instead, the article ends up with a much less interesting message. The US is going down the tubes and has been for a long time. That's a very old idea that may go back to the country's founding. It doesn't offer new insights. It doesn't open new perspectives. It just riles people up for a time. It's the kind of thing that politicians looking for new slogans to congeal a base of support turn to in campaign speeches so they can portray themselves as the only one who can drain the swamp.

glonq 3y ago

Bright Sun Films did a very nice overview of the rise and fall of BB&B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armRWC8yI-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armRWC8yI-Y

javier_e06 3y ago

Greed Street, Rapacious Street, Wall Street. Is all the same. We all let our 401 fund managers do their dirty work for us while we dream of lofty retirements. For older folks, that lived through the .com bubble, savings and loans and too-big-to-fail, and so on, this article rings disingenuous.