edders23 wrote:
As I have said for some time a business that big cannot fail because no government would risk the fallout
Doubt that - remember the dot-com bubble? When it burst it knocked $5 TRILLION off the value of the companies involved, most in the US, and I can't remember the government doing very much. Uber is chickenfeed compared to that. It does look very dot-commish though, but some companies like eBay and Amazon managed to come through the dot-com collapse.
Difference with the likes of RBS being "too big to fail" is that the banks run the money system, so if they had gone under the cash machines would have dried up pretty quickly and the whole economy would have felt the blow. Many businesses in unrelated sectors would probably have gone under as a consequence and everyone would have found it very difficult to cope. I mean, look at the damage the crisis did to the economy even when the government stepped in to bail the banks out.
Uber collapsing wouldn't be nearly so bad for the economy in general. Of course, there would be wider repercussions, but nothing like the collapse of a major bank.
The ramifications of Carillion's collapse in the UK are no doubt a lot more catastrophic for the economy than if Uber went under, but it was just left to go into liquidation.