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Replace 'Tech' With 'Banks,' and We've Seen a Big Comeuppance Before (nytimes.com)
Nathaniel Popper, writing for The New York Times: When I moved to the Bay Area two years ago, it was with a sense of relief. Relief from New York winters and deteriorating subways, yes. But also relief after six years of covering Wall Street, an industry that had moved from one crisis to another after the financial crash of 2008, drawing the unending wrath of the public. In California I was joining a growing team of reporters covering Silicon Valley, which had quickly become the new engine of the economy. Just like Wall Street before it lost its luster, the tech industry had become the destination of choice for the top college graduates. I would be writing about a place where everyone was focused more on the future than on the past.
Now, just two years after getting here, and a decade after the start of the financial crisis, I have a creeping sense of deja vu as I go about my job. Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals, quickly soured into an intense suspicion that manages to cross partisan lines, similar to what Wall Street faced after 2008 [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. As I have watched the recent parade of tech executives being grilled by Washington lawmakers from across the political spectrum, it has been eerily reminiscent of the combative hearings the big banks faced back in 2009 and 2010. As was true after the financial crisis, the backlash against tech rises out of a public awakening to the integral role that these huge companies occupy in our society -- with Facebook, Uber and Twitter playing the part that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase did a decade ago.
Now, just two years after getting here, and a decade after the start of the financial crisis, I have a creeping sense of deja vu as I go about my job. Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals, quickly soured into an intense suspicion that manages to cross partisan lines, similar to what Wall Street faced after 2008 [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. As I have watched the recent parade of tech executives being grilled by Washington lawmakers from across the political spectrum, it has been eerily reminiscent of the combative hearings the big banks faced back in 2009 and 2010. As was true after the financial crisis, the backlash against tech rises out of a public awakening to the integral role that these huge companies occupy in our society -- with Facebook, Uber and Twitter playing the part that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase did a decade ago.
What part of what is going on in tech has any similarity to the leveraged derivatives that caused the 2008 banking crisis?
Does anyone see Nintendo insuring Dell, and HP insuring Nintendo, and Apple insuring HP in a way that's going to collapse like a house of cards when Dell defaults on a loan? I don't.
With no way for anyone to really know what their exposure is when someone along the chain defaults?
Vulnerabilities and back doors that could take down a whole company or country? That sounds like so much FUD. I'm not sure that even Juan Pablo Davila even came close to sinking Chile, when he fat fingered a buy into a sell.
To be sure, Facebook and Zuckerberg have done their fair share in helping sink Democracy as we know it here in the US, and that's its own kind of disaster, but they had a lot of help from Breitbart, Faux News, and others outside of tech.
Some of the same arrogance perhaps, but these are two very different things.
It's worth mentioning the banks largely didn't do anything illegal. They either had a lawyer verify all their decisions, or they bought new laws. They were able to stay exactly within the letter of the law, be unethical without crossing the line. You have to be foolish to break the law when you have those kinds of options. (Like Madoff).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."