Comment by zymhan
14 hours ago
To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise.
Vendors may be positioned to know how a customer is doing, but they're also incentivized to overestimate how well a customer is going to perform.
GE Capital (edit: and GMCA) is a great example of how seemingly reasonable vendor financing can cause the lender serious problems.
Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products? Siemens is a perfect example of a well-run, stable, industrial giant. They offer vendor financing for large purchases. Same for the "heavies" (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, IHI, Hyundai, Doosan, Hanjin) in Japan and Korea.
If anyone is interested to learn about the damage that the financialisation of General Electric (USA) brought upon itself, you can ask ChatGPT to tell you the story. It is too long to repeat here.
Here is a sample prompt that I used to remind myself:
Are we replacing "Let me google that for you" with "Here is a prompt to feed ChatGPT" now?
Edit: I am not asking whether ChatGPT is better than Google Search, I am asking after the standard dodge of citing one's sources.
Fair point/question. For many of my HN responses, I first ask ChatGPT for a bit of information about the topic. For the case of GE Cap's wrecking of parent GE with excessive financialisation, I could only loosely remember the details from the 2000s. It is a long time ago! That prompt that I shared gave a reply that was 100s of words. Too much for copy/pasta, and too hard for me to summarise briefly. Instead, I decided to share the prompt. It is not my intention to dodge sources. Plus, the newest versions of ChatGPT is pretty good about sharing sources. (Of course, the quality of sources can be debatable.) In short, it was not my intention to be snarky by sharing my ChatGPT prompt.
EDIT ---- Also, the OP was so brief about GE Cap, I realised that most readers under 30 (maybe 35) will have almost no knowledge or memory of that economic history. I wanted to offer an "intellectual carrot" (ChatGPT prompt) for anyone wishing to learn more. ----
What bothered me most about the original post was the person was putting all vendor financing in the same "bad" bucket. I disagree. I would characterise GE Cap as an infamous example! They were the worst of the worst in a generation (25 years). Most vendor financing is very boring and is used to buy big heavy things with very long operational lives. If the buyer goes bankrupt, it is (relatively) easy to repossess the big heavy thing and sell it again (probably with vendor financing again!).
Very tangentially related comment, but I remember seeing a post on a local Facebook clone with a prompt to throw at Claude to "make a custom YouTube downloader for MacOS", so the general "Here is a prompt to feed an LLM" is somewhat real for some, apparently
It's a good use case really – it'll tell it differently according to what it knows about your background, if you 'just Google it' you'll get the same maybe-appropriate results as anyone else.
Yes, cause google has been giving crap results long before chatgpt was a thing and it only got worse. Before ai it was "let me google that on reddit for you".
Google search has gone way down hill after they nerfed it and then did nothing to prevent the flood of AI slop seo websites. So unfortunately, instead of sharing links everyone now gets sent to the inefficient text generator that hallucinates nonsense and will color the average summary of a topic by whoever trained it and your most recent chat history instead.
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Yes.
> Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products?
The OP did mention GE Capital, the motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing. And of massaging the accounting books in order to increase shareholder value in the short term, also.
I doubt they are bigger than other national "heavy industry" champions from East Asia and Western/Central Europe. Without checking, I would guess that the global leaders are Boeing and Airbus.
The risks are different, but there's no getting around that the value of any investment is based on future cash flows and that's speculating about the future.
To the extent that Google and Anthropic are competing for AI business, Google is somewhat hedged against Anthropic winning market share. They still get data center revenue and they own equity, so that’s a consolation prize.
On the other hand, it’s increasing Google’s investment in AI, in general.
GE Capital was a different creature, riding the line of fraud in some ways. They misapplied accounting rules and had to write down or capitalize over $20B for long term care insurance.
That's what brought them down, but that could bring down anyone. My point is that vendor financing turns non-finance companies into finance companies, and brings along a huge can of worms.
That’s fair. You become vulnerable to a guy like Jack Welch.
The vendor financing stuff I saw (as a junior / intern at a supplier) in those days was a reflection of that culture. They’d lease capital equipment through GE Capital, and pack it with other stuff to the limit of their accountants appetite for risk. (You can usually roll 20% of the value into services or peripheral stuff) I remember one deal where we had to run around and buy office supplies and tools with a corporate card. I did 4 Honda Civic of laser toner.
GE was reporting their own capital equipment and office supplies as revenue on the Capital side. :) But that is penny ante stuff in terms of what they did.
The AI stuff is a shady variation of that, but likely far worse as we’ve fired all of the watchers.
I don't know the full the history of this story, but I honestly wonder if type of scandal is still possible in the United States. After Enron and Worldcomm, the US introduced Sarbanes-Oxley reporting regulations. Additionally, after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, there was a dramatic increase in regulations for banks (of all kinds) and insurance companies.
[delayed]
.. yet today we have Kalshi, Polymarket, et al.
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GE Capital was not just vendor financing and its serious problems were not due to vendor financing. I don’t think it is a great example in any way.
$40 billion is about a quarter’s worth of profits for Google. They make that much every 3 months, what’s the risk
Hat tip. Great point. To quote J Paul Getty: "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." In this case, yes, the investment is large, but not bankrupting for Google if it goes wrong.