SNEK POLICY
No Corporate Bailouts
If a company makes bad decisions and fails, shareholders and management should generally bear the consequences.
Protect people, not investors
There are circumstances where a collapse can threaten customers, depositors, infrastructure, or the broader financial system. In those cases, protect innocent people and stabilize what is genuinely necessary without automatically rescuing owners or executives.
Failure is part of a market
Private gains paired with guaranteed public losses is not a functioning market. If the company fails, it fails. Saving customers is different from saving ownership.
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Why SNEK thinks this
Markets only work when failure is possible. If owners and investors keep the upside when a company succeeds but can hand the downside to taxpayers when it fails, the market has been replaced by political protection. SNEK wants government to protect innocent customers, depositors, workers, and genuinely essential systems when necessary without automatically rescuing the people who owned or managed the failed company.
How it would work
If a major failure threatens the broader economy or essential infrastructure, government can stabilize the specific function that must continue. That can include protecting insured depositors, keeping a critical service operating, or arranging an orderly wind-down. Shareholders, executives, and unsecured investors should not automatically be made whole. Any emergency intervention should be temporary, transparent, and structured to avoid rewarding the decisions that caused the failure.
Where we’re flexible or still working it out
A disorderly collapse can sometimes cause more damage than a controlled intervention. The line is between protecting the public and protecting ownership. The exact mechanism can vary by industry, but the burden should be on government to explain why intervention is necessary and why private losses are not simply being shifted onto taxpayers.