Ok, let's look at a theoretical business that is designed to survive a pandemic. Well, what is the biggest problem that would affect such a business? Of course, lack of customers! If you don't have customers you also don't need employees. So you can just fire them! Now that we have gotten rid of the first dead weight the next problem is that you still have certain fixed costs. All that real estate is now empty since you fired all your employees. There isn't much you can do except save up money like scrooge McDuck. The easiest way to get that money is by screwing over your employees during good times. Don't give them raises and bonuses. You'll need that money during some government lock down. Now the lockdown is over and your business survived without needing government help.

Maybe you have noticed something. The rich managers don't really a give a damn about the lock down. They have a huge amount of money and mostly diversified their net worth away from their own business. $5 million after a 50% stock market crash is still $2.5 million.

That might sound like a huge loss but only when you forget to consider that there also exist people that aren't managers and they are in the majority. If you lose your job that is pretty much a 100% reduction in income. If you lose your job you can't just kick out the rest of your family to reduce costs. For every manager that is seeing his portfolio dip there are probably a dozen more non-managers having a worse time.

The bank bailouts weren't actually about bailing out banks. The taxpayers were bailing their own money out. Dead banks mean your money is gone. It's like video game servers shutting down. Your stuff is just gone. The managers at the bank probably couldn't care less about their customers losing all their funds.

As discussed before, not only in this thread but in the responses to other articles, some of these companies should not have wasted their cash on stock buybacks. They ran out of their emergency funds, and have only themselves to blame.

Besides the fact that FDIC would have covered those ( anyone remembers FDIC fridays? ), banks are not servers. Your analogy is wrong. If they failed, the disruption would be great, but money would not be lost, the houses, cars, equipment, factories, people would still be there. The bailout was aimed at the real owners in the US. And they got it. Simply because golden rule works.

Both money and value would be lost. The former due to write-offs (one persons debt is another’s person’s income) and the latter due to disorganization / entropy / chaos. The FDIC fund is not able to cover all deposits currently and would require massive government spending and distribution.

A failing bank doesn't mean your money is gone. In the US, savings accounts are FDIC insured up to a maximum of $250K. If your bank fails, it's likely getting acquired by another bank anyway. Customers have value.

"Otherwise, you're supporting greed and kleptocracy with monetary policy." sounds like the MO of the current presidential administration...

"Never let a crisis go to waste."