Shlomit Azgad-Tromer is a visiting scholar at Berkeley Law School. This post is based on the article Too Important to Fail: Bankruptcy Versus Bailout of Socially Important Non-Financial Institutions.
Systemically important financial institutions are broadly considered to pose a risk to the entire economy upon failure. Thus governments act upon their failure, providing them with an implied insurance policy for ongoing liquidity. Yet governments frequently provide de facto liquidity insurance for non-financial institutions as well. For example, recently in the U.K., 35 hospital trusts were sharing £536 million in non-repayable bailouts in order to keep services running smoothly during 2013-2014. A decade earlier, a federal bankruptcy judge approved California’s multibillion-dollar bailout of Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation. In an effort to stabilize and sustain air transportation after 9/11, the U.S. Congress passed the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, which provided the airline industry with financial aid valued at as much as $10 billion. In all of these cases, taxpayer money was used to rescue non-financial institutions.