Re:Forget Wall Street, worry about fintech
by adventured on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @04:25PM
(#15453146)
This is a fatalism meets comeuppance fetish. The emotional desire to see the next crisis come out of Silicon Valley, rather than a rational consideration for how likely that actually is.
The mainstream media is increasingly frothing at the mouth as it pertains to Silicon Valley being a power target for them to hit. You can barely avoid it on a daily basis when it comes to the NY Times or Washington Post etc. Somewhere in the last few years it became acceptable to target pretty much all aspects of SV for criticism (whether culture, or wealth, or political influence, or demographics), whereas previously it was mostly off-limits (not only did their audience largely not want to read it, SV is almost entirely liberal and a modern extraordinary economic success story, so attacking that made no sense across the board). What changed? It's simple, only one thing changed in the last 20-30 years: its companies got so big that it now challenges the power structures in DC and NY, and has corporations that are richer and more powerful than eg Exxon Mobil or Walmart. So the liberal media has decided their own ideological brothers in SV are now fair game due to their immense wealth and influence (I don't have an elaborate opinion on that targeting, it clearly crossed some vague threshold in the last few years).
Fintech is so hilariously, comically tiny compared to what caused the 2007 financial disaster (billions of dollars in scale vs trillions of dollars in scale). It would take decades of non-stop expansion for Silicon Valley's fintech to get big enough to pose that sort of national economic risk. You can tell that's the case by how empty the article is of any actual content or argument - it's about seven paragraphs of content, and maybe less than one paragraph says anything in support of the article's premise.
The mainstream media is increasingly frothing at the mouth as it pertains to Silicon Valley being a power target for them to hit. You can barely avoid it on a daily basis when it comes to the NY Times or Washington Post etc. Somewhere in the last few years it became acceptable to target pretty much all aspects of SV for criticism (whether culture, or wealth, or political influence, or demographics), whereas previously it was mostly off-limits (not only did their audience largely not want to read it, SV is almost entirely liberal and a modern extraordinary economic success story, so attacking that made no sense across the board). What changed? It's simple, only one thing changed in the last 20-30 years: its companies got so big that it now challenges the power structures in DC and NY, and has corporations that are richer and more powerful than eg Exxon Mobil or Walmart. So the liberal media has decided their own ideological brothers in SV are now fair game due to their immense wealth and influence (I don't have an elaborate opinion on that targeting, it clearly crossed some vague threshold in the last few years).
Fintech is so hilariously, comically tiny compared to what caused the 2007 financial disaster (billions of dollars in scale vs trillions of dollars in scale). It would take decades of non-stop expansion for Silicon Valley's fintech to get big enough to pose that sort of national economic risk. You can tell that's the case by how empty the article is of any actual content or argument - it's about seven paragraphs of content, and maybe less than one paragraph says anything in support of the article's premise.