[netwanderer3]

If the government keeps bailing out large corporations, can this eventually form a pattern in which major corporations and industries may collectively and artificially engineer a crash or downturn event to game the system?

Once any pattern is formed and determined, there are always some people who will attempt to exploit it, and those people are often the ones who would eventually ruin all the good things for everybody else.

[fmajid]

The term you are looking for is "moral hazard".

They won't deliberately cause crashes, because those are not profitable, but they will deliberately make risky bets that benefit them if things go well, and get bailed out if they fail (riskier bets have more upside for the kleptocrats looking out for Number One).

Given the odds, crashes are nearly inevitable. This is undistinguishable from deliberate crashes.

The policies enacted after the 2008 crisis have actually made the banking sector even more concentrated and increased the likelihood of another such crash caused by moral hazard in the Too Big to Fail financial institutions. The procedures to fight against that, like "living wills", will likely have the same effectiveness as bulletproof vests made of wet toilet paper.

[ooobit]

Not without severe repercussions in the market.

The dance between supply and demand in a market enforces a number of unavoidable consequences. When an outside influence artificially influences a change in one side, a contraction often occurs in the other. That reaction can often overcorrect. Theoretically, a small downturn in supply could cause a proportional contraction in demand as price rises. But what usually happens is the response is driven both by the proportion of downturn and a measure of future value confidence based on additional factors. Subtle changes can game the system a little, but every change carries an added risk of flight to substitutes.

At a low point, the ROI on trying to game market share or other factors quickly narrows.