> good way to hand wealth to the people and take it from corporations and the super wealthy

Hence the power that be try to prevent it best they can. In some cases, unsuccessfully (Iceland) and in others, a bit more successful (the US). But seemingly, they're only able to delay the inevitable, not completely prevent it.

Big corporate borrowed the money already, so it will stay with some (other) big corporate in this scenario. The bankers who did it will see that coming and move their money elsewhere and keep their money as well.

What you suggest will hit normal persons.

What we really need is people going to jail that let stuff like that happen. Let them bear actual responsibility for their 1,000k+ salary.

The U.S. also let a bank collapse and shit hit the fan across the world.

The global economy isn’t pivoting off Icelandic banks the way it is off US ones.

> and is now doing rather well

I was going to write a shitty reply to this, but the more research I did, the more it seems actually this went pretty well for them. UK and NL governments that lost deposits in the Icelandic banks mostly got their cash back (eventually), there was recession and unemployment but not that much worse than other countries, and the country is in good standing again with the markets.

I would note that this is much much easier to do if your investors are foreign, rather than domestic pension funds, so it doesn’t bring down the government, though.

Iceland's banks were full of money from people in the UK. It's a lot easier to default when there only a small political and economic price.

The issue is that major US banks are systematically important to the US and also everyone else. Practically nobody cares about Icelandic banks - not even their depositors if their deposits were protected by the state (which they were).

If a bank like JP Morgan were to fail, the event would be without exaggeration cataclysmic to everyone, even small local banks and credit unions. Even if ultimately the clients of JPM could be made whole, the weeks of uncertainty and frozen funds would single handedly obliterate the financial systems across the globe. It's the age old adage: "if you get margin called and get wiped out, it doesn't matter that you'd have recovered just 2 weeks later". The world as a whole is deeply leveraged. It's that leverage that affords us the ability to supercharge all the growth, from AI to drugs research, insurance, EV... everything. But that leverage comes at a cost, which is that systemically important institutions failing can have disastrous cascading de-leveraging effects.

I'm sure we'd more or less all survive and the world would recover, but it would likely be a 2008 GFC style scenario most likely.

Private credit is just some guy skimming 3% while risking your pensions.

Why would you think that? You think pension funds and governments didn't invest this time? Because that's the problem, governments either investing everyone's money directly (to fund their own loans and expenditures, or should I say fund their own expenses using pension money without admitting that's what they're doing to pensioners) or indirectly force investments (you'll find pension funds worldwide are legally only allowed to invest in loans to the government and specific things the government allows (like politicians' charities). "For safety", of course, no other motivations there)

We can check if governments went back to their own tricks or not after 2008. What were the interest rates after 2008? Quick check ... yep, they went back to the old tricks.

When "shit hits the fan". Either governments really cut spending, leave pensioners without income and see their new loan interest spike to 10%+ (if they're lucky) ...

OR they do a massive cash injection saving the banks, and increase spending.

Which would you chose? It doesn't even matter. If you were the government and chose the first option, you would quickly find suddenly everyone across the political spectrum uniting to depose you. A decent chunk of people would literally not have any other choice but to do that.

(of course, as per usual governments aren't behaving "correctly" according to economic theory. If you take the old "government as spender of last resort" governments should have radically cut spending in the last 10 years, because there was no need for extra spending. If you take the new "government invests pensions", then of course government spending needs to be investment. In other words, governments only allowed to spend like a normal investor, expecting and demanding a return. Ie. no social spending increases. In practice governments increased spending at any cost, and so we're in trouble again)

Oh and should I mention that for any other entity investing pension money in loans to yourself is a very unique thing in law. It is THE ONLY financial crime where corporate structures do not protect management. You're the worldwide president of ExxonMobil? Doesn't matter. You do with employee pension money what government does with it? (ie. loan it to yourself, in this case ExxonMobil). You go to jail. Directly and long-term. In America. In Spain. In Japan. In fucking Vatican city.

They think they’re immune. Even after Luigi, they still think they’re immune

China's doing it

The guillotine requires being in control of the situation. It can only be used by those with the power to act with impunity.

It's not fighting against tyrants, it's a declaration of an intention to be the next tyrants.

Wild that we all lived exactly the same way before AI

Really changed so little in my life. I just use chatgpt instead of Google search now

It's being marketed as some ground breaking revolutionary change when all it is is a better widget

Remove it and the worst that will happen is that I'll go back to writing my emails and my code by hand - something I've done for the last 20 years anyway

Why not? What am I missing.

If you loan me 10 pounds and I simply keep it or spend it but refuse to pay you back - aren't I the winner and you the loser?

Claiming that the market is a positive sum system, because I use that 10 pounds to invent something that changes world productivity is missing the fact that there is a constant stream of huge energy inputs from the sun - that's ultimately what allows the local entropy to decrease - not that you lent me 10 pounds.

Sure - but that's a meta question of whether the current economic/political systems are delivering good allocation of resources for whatever target function you favour.

And that's complex - even in your simple example you can argue that people have likely improved their capability to dig and fill holes - and the latter skill is particularly valuable in the UK right now.

ie Entropy includes information component :-)