[rvz]

> Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs?

They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout.

UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line.

One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.

[mikeocool]

SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them).

Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.

[matwood]

Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.

[anonymars]

> Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always

Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail?

Looks like the answer is no: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-le...

So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?

[rvz]

So we all now know that a bailout DID occur with the SVB depositors who had all their money in the bank and most deposits were over the FDIC insurance limit. The FDIC insurance rules somehow didn't apply here because there was too much money at risk. (And too big to fail).

But if there was a bank failure at a regionally smaller bank with a regular customer or startup depositing the same amount of money over the insurance limit, their money is gone.

Just like Intel got a "bailout" from investment as chosen by the US government, AI will eventually have a very similar story.

[matwood]

> Sure, but is that the case now?

Pretty much and has been for awhile.

https://nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100-NYU-...

In early 2023, within the span of two months, the United States experienced three out of the four largest commercial bank failures in U.S. history, as Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic Bank all toppled.1 Yet, despite these banks having roughly $300 billion in uninsured deposits at the time of their failures2 and despite the failures costing the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) an estimated $38 billion, uninsured depositors took no losses in any of the failures.3 While these results were striking, they were far from unusual. Since 2008, uninsured depositors have experienced losses in only 6% of total U.S. bank failures.

...

Formally, the United States caps deposit insurance at $250,000 per account,6 but, in reality, the post-2008 financial system comes close to providing de facto total deposit insurance covering all amounts in all accounts.

[fragmede]

> UBI only exists for companies

What's the U stand for in UBI?