TL;DR: private equity

You can actually skip step 1 if you want. That's what they did with toys'r'us. Those actions have long since convinced me anything financial is just a game played by the very rich.

Buy up everything and then default on our loans? Yup. If they aren't trying, their incompetence is actually pretty impressive.

Man, no trying, it's past and present tense now, doing and successfully did.

Set up a shell company. Set up a trust somewhere with no capital gain tax. Shift ownership of the shell to the trust. As the shell, come to an agreement in principal with the bank to buy it. Use this as colateral to raise a loan from the bank for the purchase amount. Transfer the debt to the bank as part of the merger with the shell company. The bank now basically owes itself to itself. Sell the combined company from the trust, thus avoiding capital gain tax.

take out a smaller loan to bribe the person who appeoves the loans

Brute force loan application: Keep trying random identities until one goes through.

Be a billionaire of course. This only works if you are rich.

pulls out minigun from payday 2

loan approved

😎

Set the bank on fire and try the next one

Please dad. It's for good cause.

The bank loans its ten billion to you

A bank that's subject to government regulation isn't going to do that unless "you" have billions in assets to justify that kind of sale.

and you pay me those ten billion for the bank

And surely you report that sale on your taxes and pay the relevant taxes, right?

No one's net worth has changed.

Except you, once you've paid your taxes.

You default on your loan to your own bank.

Ok, so "you" missed the payment. Now what? You think "you" can walk away cleanly? Declaring bankruptcy to wipe your debt is only something that's available if the government provides that kind of mechanism, and generally that's only available to people who have otherwise followed all the rules, which wouldn't include buying a ten billion dollar bank when they had no assets.

The only way this scenario works is if you ignore all the laws. But, if you're ignoring the laws, why not just make it simpler and simply steal the bank's assets?

Is capitalism real?!?!n1?

nothing has happened

Right, which is why it’s not some hero-swaggers-triumphantly maneuver. That’s the ridiculous part.

Effectively nothing has happened.

A lot of people lost a lot of their money and got their lives destroyed. Also, the previous owners liquidated their shares.

But yeah, you haven't got any richer.

We found the jealous one 🙄

And then other businesses that have "too good" numbers buy those failing businesses and let them go bankrupt to use as larger write-offs and get tax rebates.