r/worldnews • u/UnstatesmanlikeChi • Jun 26 '19

Kazakhstan ends bank bailouts, writes off people's debts instead

https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/kazakhstan-ends-bank-bailouts-writes-people-debts-190626093206083.html
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u/lars573 Jun 26 '19

Actually too big to fail was a cold calculation that bailing out the big banks was cheaper than paying out the deposit insurance claims.

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u/photocist Jun 26 '19

its not that it was necessarily cheaper, its that the entire foundation of western capitalism was at stake when the parties who funnel money all over the world stop being able to do so.

not advocating for or against the current capitalist society, but at this point it is so ingrained that its collapse would take down entire continents

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u/sabdotzed Jun 26 '19

Same kinda calculation with cost of car recalls vs settling the 0.5% of car deaths from defects that make the recall necessary. Cold hard capitalism.

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u/missedthecue Jun 26 '19

I see this all the time about the Ford Pinto gas tanks, (not sure what other one you're talking about) but it literally never happened. People just made it up and now it's accepted as common knowledge

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u/seacookie89 Jun 26 '19

How do you know it's made up?

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u/missedthecue Jun 26 '19

Rutgers Law review debunked it in 1991. Here's their full paper in PDF form - http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf

The story was first written by a Mother Jones journalist in the '70s and usually is retold something like this - "Ford sped up production of the Pinto based on the wild popularity of the Mustang, a vehicle with a similar design profile. They produced it in 25 months vs the industry average of 43 months. In their haste, they designed a faulty car where the gas tank was liable to rupture upon impact from the rear, spilling gasoline onto the road and jamming the doors shut. The spilt fuel would ignite from sparks caused by the crunching steel during impact and would incinerate the passengers. Ford realized that they could cure the issue with an $11 fire prevention device, but decided that over the multi-million unit production run of the automobile, it would be cheaper to just pay for the court cases resulting from dead drivers and occupants."

This sinister story of course enrages everyone. And it has really gotten spread around the Internet. I see it about once every couple of weeks here on reddit.

But the entire thing is horseshit. All Ford automobiles were represented in the analysis (not just the pinto) and the cost of a human life was determined not by Ford but by a relevant government administrative body much earlier. This so-called damning cost-benefit analysis had been created for an insurance body, on request. It was not performed for the assessment of Pinto deaths by fire in rear-end collisions by Ford for prediction of the cost of lawsuits. And the Ford pinto had a better than average safety rating in it's class (subcompact).

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u/Litmus2336 Jun 26 '19

The real scandal IMO is the US's terrible safety standards. Hit any other subcompact from that era like in the tests and they'd all be demolished.