/biz/ - Business & Finance

[Anonymous No.1201285]

I have some questions about some economic hypotheticals.

>Can a city go bankrupt? If so, how?
>If a city were to go bankrupt, what would the process be, if a company were to bail it out?
>Is it sensical for an industrial city to go bankrupt, and for a hypothetical megacorporation to bail it out; buying the factories, employing the workers, etc, and in the deal signed by the city representatives and the corporate representatives, clauses dictating linguistic/cultural controls?

I know very little about economics, and am writing some fiction where something similar to the above occurs, could you help me with keeping it credible, or at least reasonably within the realms of reality?

[Anonymous No.1201290]

>>1201285
>Can a city go bankrupt? If so, how?
Look up Venezuela. Its happening there right now.
>>1201285
>clauses dictating linguistic/cultural controls
Somehow I think other countries would "liberate" the new corporate state.

[Anonymous No.1201298]

>>1201290
I'd best give my idea in full.

>in the mid 2020s, there is a boots-on-the-ground war with an ISIS-like, who have no qualms about the use of chemical weaponry and military robots.
>a taskforce of about a million is assembled by the EU and is sent to fight.
>they come back fucked up in 11 ways.
>during the war, some nations enacted japanese-internment-camp style policies to minimize 5th column activities, along with strong-arming WhatsApp and other p2p encryption networks to give security backdoors in order to hunt sympathizers to the terrorist cause.
>along with other issues such as overspending, racial tension, paranoia, housing crashes and the like-
>several major industrial cities and their companies go bankrupt.
>not even the IMF can afford to bail them out.
>in the confusion, some japanese megacorps come along and offer to bail out the cities
>on the understanding that Japanese is taught to children from the age of eight, to university level, for the next fifty years; and other forms of cultural imperialism.

The deal is, you're still German/British/French/Italian/whatever, but you and your children are expected to learn Japanese, and that's more or less it.

I'm just not precisely sure about the mechanics of
>several major industrial cities and their companies go bankrupt.

[Anonymous No.1201313]

Or is that idea just completely retarded in the first place? What is retarded about it?

[Anonymous No.1202509]

Bump for interest?

[Anonymous No.1202522]

>>1201285
Not hypothetical. Detroit recently emerged from bankruptcy.

[Anonymous No.1202525]

>>1202522
Regardless of /pol/ memes, from what I think the main reason Detroit collapsed was because the auto manufacturing companies outsourced.
Is that right?

[Anonymous No.1202767]

>>1201313
Its retarded. There is no benefit for Japanese to bail out failed cities instead of investing into functioning cities. Whats the point of sharing a language with the economically weakest regions?

[Anonymous No.1202779]

>>1201298
are you 12 or just retarded?

[Anonymous No.1202790]

>>1202525

The auto industry was the cow from which the vampiric city drew blood yes, but you have to look at 1) why the city was so dependant on it and 2) why the auto industry had to leave. Relocating is a huge pain in the ass. Taxes, unions and an enormously bloated public sector drove the productive parts of the economy out. Look at the extensive corruption in Detroit, it blew my socks off to see this happen in America.

You see, when you say that things happened because the auto companies outsourced it sounds like the market just did a thing. While saying that is not incorrect it is also less than half of the equation.

[Anonymous No.1202793]

>>1201298
Historically, large scale wars have spurred economic growth, not caused bankruptcy.

[Anonymous No.1202821]

>>1202525

well aside from blacks/white flight etc.. public sector pensions cause a big issue

having pensions reliant on future tax revenues doesn't work out well if the population of the city paying those tax revenues shrinks.. pensions ought to be funded out of a fund paid in to at the time the recipients of those pensions are employed... instead AFAIK there was a big public sector and even when cutting the current public employees the retired ones from when the city was larger still need to be provided for

[Anonymous No.1203216]

>>1202767
The factories are still there, just not operational.

If you were given the option to pick up a couple dozen (usually very expensive) factories with chemical/robotic/technical capacities on the cheap (like, for 1-5% of the price) and have an instant, already educated and trained workforce, who are currently sitting on their arses with nothing to do- wouldn't you buy it?

I'm still not quite sure as to how an industry would go from, at the beginning of the war, to producing a vast array of hardware for both military and civillian use- to the workers arranging mass strikes (possibly due to worker casualties) to the cities collapsing economically because no more industry.

Is there anything remotely credible in that? I'm just blanking here. Missing a few steps. What would you suggest as something likely to happen that would cause such a great economic collapse and subsequent revival?

I'm sorry if this is dumb. I just am slightly illiterate w/r/t/ business.

[Anonymous No.1203225]

>>1202793
Is that due to mobilization of industry providing more jobs to lower-income workers, thereby allowing for more money being fed back into the economy through purchases and taxes thereof, or am I missing something?

[Anonymous No.1203252]

>>120129
large scale use of "military robots" by mid 2020s is not feasible for nation states, let alone terrorist organizations

EU may not even exist in 10 years

Japan has no reason to force its language on such a geographically distant region. it makes no sense for that to incentivize them

there's many more issues but I'm typing on a phone . go read some history or something , none of this is grounded in reality

[Anonymous No.1203262]

>>1203252
>go read some history
Sure, what should I read?

> "military robots"
By those, I mean combat drones or smart ieds- not super battle droids.

>EU
standin for whatever will come after

>many more issues
please do share.

[Anonymous No.1203287]

>>1203262
start with Roman and Greek history. get an overview of it. then move forward in time. you'll start to see patterns in the rise and fall of nations and you can work those into your own story.

[Anonymous No.1203292]

>>1203287
Alright. I've been planning to read Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire for a while, I'll take a look over the summer.

If I am intent in involving corporate vassalage, how should that happen? What is the most credible way for that to come about?

[Anonymous No.1203307]

>>1203292
I don't know. you'd have to have a plausible scenario where the state couldn't simply seize corporate assets by force, meaning there would have to be some sort of law that allowed private organizations to have domestic militaries, or some corporation went rogue (maybe with the battle robots)

[Anonymous No.1203322]

>>1203307
Okay.
So perhaps what becomes of the EU subcontracts its military robots to some Japanese corporations- by allowing them to rent factories in Germany, France, England, Czech Rep, Spain, etc. They build the robots, and the war goes well. However, several Bad Things could happen
>factory workers arrange strikes due to a combination of war weariness and the lethality inherent to the building of the robots, due to rumours that they're being underpaid, due to union clashes
>some homegrown dissidents begin bombing civilian areas and sabotaging some factories
>a lead scientist from one of these corporations is assassinated.

This leads to the Japanese securing their European presence with the robots out of fear that their factories will be destroyed, and thus, a steady hostile takeover of the cities begins. The govts cannot seize assets by force because they're still the only ones with the tech to make the robots, and also have control over their networks...

Does that work better?

[Anonymous No.1203340]

>>1203322
getting better I think. but how does Japan project power onto the EU? it would need military bases in Africa or the Middle East or something... but then it seems like theyd be obliged to take care of that Isis faction for their own safety , and would have less bargaining power against Europe

[Anonymous No.1203354]

>>1203340
The robots work on an internal network, so as to minimize the ability to hack them. As a double-edged sword, these robots can be reprogrammed to be hostile towards the EU soldiers/civilians. As there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of them in the EU army and in EU cities, they act as a very real threat.

[Anonymous No.1203460]

>>1201285
>what is detroit
>what is flint, MI