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Notes -
Silicon Valley Bank crashed just a day ago, and many folks in the VC/startup world are freaking out. I’ve seen predictions that 50-100 different startups will go bankrupt over the next month. This could cause a contagion effect and lead to worse effects, although I’m skeptical of a major economic collapse as some doomsday prophets have discussed.
Apparently the bank was mostly into mortgage backed securities, which lost a ton of value due to the Fed’s precedented* rate hikes. I don’t know enough about finance to confidently hop on my soapbox here - @BurdensomeCount may have a better idea of what’s going on.
As this collapse mainly affects very left coded super technical folks, I don’t expect many on the right to shed tears. That being said I do think this speaks to a larger issue of growth in the economy as a whole. Tyler Cowen has famously backed the stagnation hypothesis, or the idea that overall production has been slowing down.
Tech startups have recently been the major sector looked to for economic growth, especially with all the AI/LLM hype. This collapse not only will slow the industry but shows a marked incompetence from this growth sector which may cool investment there in the future.
How can we sustain economic growth without the recent massive gains from Silicon Valley technology?
I mean, is it a bad thing if these companies go bankrupt? Do we really need more companies in the world like this?
The alternate to AI doing it is people doing that. I did that by hand at my job. When publishers make books, they need to get someone to buy them - preferably professors who then proscribe them for their class.
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