My contrarian take of the day is that many otherwise good and healthy companies—not Boeing—could not be expected to have prepared financially for this event and that it makes sense to bail them out—the issue of stock buybacks aside

This is not like 2008 where financial institutions blew themselves up with reckless behavior and then turned around and begged the Feds to rebuild their house.

The moral hazard there was obvious. In this case, not so much.

It’s the opposite in this case. If you DON’T bail them out, you create a bunch of perverse incentives. Big companies hoarding cash and/or spending huge sums on pandemic insurance that is better spent on innovation and expansion.

There’s a bunch of companies who are way over-levered ofc and might get a free ride that they don’t deserve, but the impulse to let all these companies just fail—hotels, airlines, etc.—seems like leftover resentment from bailouts in the past. It wouldn’t actually accomplish much.

Ofc I’d feel much more strongly about this if I thought these same companies cared at all about our country and fellow citizens, and that they’d repay the bailout by hiring our people and not auctioning the national commonweal for a few extra cents on the dollar...

But I’m not convinced that letting the little(r) guys fail—indie oil producers for example—so they can all be snatched up by the big guys, thereby accelerating consolidation of these industries, is either good or fair