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by sgeisler 1955 days ago
Probably an unpopular opinion on a VC site, but to some degree recessions are good and needed to weed out underperforming and utterly useless companies to free up resources. The lack of such and bail-outs/rescuing attempts by governments to "save jobs" [1] have delayed necessary restructuring for way too long. Also, if recessions are the norm rather than the exception I'd expect people and companies to be more prepared (e.g. by being less leveraged, keeping more savings), so that the actual event isn't as bad on a personal level and it's just about capital reallocation.

[1] an especially bullshitty argument, since ideally we'd want to get rid of jobs that don't add (enough) value to make the economy more efficient. I think the wasted human resources and ingenuity are the greatest tragedy.

2 comments

Except low aggregate demand recessions do no such thing. It's often the opposite. Recessions keep alive inefficient manual labor intensive, low tech service industries because they make available cheap unemployed/underemployed labor. That's on top of the inefficiency of people doing nothing and living off of unemployment benefit/welfare.

Under performing companies get much more efficiently "creatively destructed" in an economy that is running hot where only the more efficient, well tooled businesses can afford employees at tight labor market wages. On top of this, fewer human resources are left wastefully idle.

High interest rates weed out underperforming companies. That's exactly what inflation is for. The reality is that CPI inflation is still dead and the fed is irresponsibly following a 0% interest rate strategy that will never work out.