No Tech Bubble Here, Says CNN: "This Time It's Different." 252
ErichTheRed writes I saw this on the Money page of CNN today. Apparently, various stock analysts have declared that this run-up in stock prices is different than the 1999 version. OK, we don't have the pets.com sock puppet, Webvan or theglobe.com anymore, but when Uber is given a valuation of $40 billion, can a crash be far behind?
Fool me once, shame on you... (Score:5, Insightful)
...Fool me twice, shame on me.
This is wise advice when discussing the Wall Street crowd.
Re:Fool me once, shame on you... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you invested in the "bubbling" Uber earlier and sold out now you would be anything other than poor or stupid. As long as you get out before the burst, you win.
Also remember the fools with money are often not the ones making the decisions and giving the advice.
The finance industry is funded on churn and stock fluctuations. They win on the way up AND often on the way down (overall, I am not talking about individual traders or trades).
It is highly possible that Goldman Ballsacks will be investing people's money heavily into these stocks while betting against the stocks with other money as the bubble goes - just like they did during the last one.
But the question is NEVER what HAS happened, it is always what is going to happen in the future and roughly when. Most people fail HARD at this and should really just STFU because they have no idea what they are talking about.
Just waving your hand about predicting doom "sometime" hardly counts as insight in this sort of market.
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The tricky thing about bubbles is that they can be difficult to spot, even by seasoned investors.
Though to be brutally honest, I think Facebook is more "overvalued" than Uber. Unlike Uber, they don't have any actual paying customers besides ad revenue. Being an ad revenue only company is what got a lot of the dot com companies in trouble in the 90's.
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The thing with investment is not what you should NOT do with your money, there are always a million of those, it is what you SHOULD be doing.
And any advice must always be compared to WHAT ELSE you could be doing with said money.
So you are going to bury your money in gold because your paranoid? Congrats, you are now possibly losing the 5+% interest you could have been making in the meantime.
Do that for a year and you are a big loser also.
Bubbles can be a FANTASTIC time to make money. Bo
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So you are going to bury your money in gold because your paranoid? Congrats, you are now possibly losing the 5+% interest you could have been making in the meantime.
Even shitty investors know that gold is a shitty investment. The only people that make serious money on gold are the ones who pay people minimum wage to spin those "we buy gold/compramos oro" signs, melt jewelry/false teeth/unwanted bullion into other bullion, and then sell it on those gold pimping commercials. And those people only sell it to A) old people B) people who are convinced that the world could very well end any day now and need it "just in case" only to later sell it at basement price.
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What's difficult is predicting when the bubble is going to pop
That's why bubbles are tricky. Often times you'll see something that looks like a bubble, and instead of popping it turns into a long term trend.
Uber... not the poster child for "safe investment" (Score:2)
If Uber "pops", it won't take even mildly savvy investors with it. Not sure how much of a hit that would be overall.
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So your strategy is to buy things that are going to go up in price? That's a really good one. Let me write that down.
Anybody can look back and see what they should have done. That's not a difficult skill to master. The hard part is doing it going forward. That's really hard.
<Cue the anecdotes from people who bought Uber early. That's not data.>
Buy low, sell high (Score:2)
no one ever lost money faithfully following that advice
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no one ever lost money faithfully following that advice
Becuase faithfully following it is not possible.
You don't know what will go up in price, you can only make more or less educated guesses. If those guesses are right you make money, if your guesses are wrong you lose money.
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If you invested in the "bubbling" Uber earlier and sold out now you would be anything other than poor or stupid. As long as you get out before the burst, you win.
Get out of what? Uber is not publicly traded. Unless you happen to run a VC operation from your basement (which would require millions) there is no way you could have made money with that company.
Most people fail HARD at this and should really just STFU because they have no idea what they are talking about.
Exactly.
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Did anyone say Tesla was part of the bubble? They have a physical product (unlike Facebook) which has passed various stages of regulatory approval in multiple jurisdictions (unlike Uber). Their business model doesn't involve using their customers as unpaid labour (unlike DuoLingo) or on paying their suppliers a ridiculously low rate (unlike Spotify).
There is potential for real growth in Tesla, so there's no incentive for cash-up-and-cash-out, and the early IPO meant the potential for wider public buy-in bot
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Tesla was probably a ridiculously risky gamble at $20. The company very nearly went bankrupt.
Risky, but you can calculate that in. And the only reason that it nearly went bankrupt was that the company deals with actual stuff -- research, manufacture, sales -- rather than just being a fancy webpage. I'm not a particular fan of Tesla (Tesla Motors, at least -- Nikolai was seemingly a pretty cool customer), but it's not in the same market as Uber or Facebook.
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Almost NO ONE can pick winners with anything approaching 100% accuracy - that includes the "experts".
BallsSacks and co make their money by gaming the system with their size, profiting on other people's risk and ability to write the legislation governing them etc. Not predicting winners.
I cannot believe the ignorance of some of the commenting on here. This is finance 101.
Please for the love of god stop embarrassing yourselves!?
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Say it with me Beavis:
Uber, crash, heh heh
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...Fool me twice, shame on...uhhhh...we won't get fooled again.
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no. More like
"There's a sucker born every minute" - David Hannum
it's not (Score:5, Funny)
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Isn't the difference (Score:4, Insightful)
In that the companies make money this time?
Google seem to be traded at P/E 26 (Google finance, assume that's on actual profits and not ideas for the future) which is pretty reasonable. The interest environment is shit and Google at least have an urge to do new products. Whatever they will always be the search and information gathering giant I guess one could question.
Facebook mean-while is valued at P/E 75 which is way higher.
Do I trust or care Facebook even remotely as much as Google?
No I don't.
I don't care for Facebook at all. So do their social platform deserve that? Then again at least they have made more money than before.
Something like Microsoft is 17.7 so whetever. H&M is 30 as comparison. Sure there's a bigger market to sell clothes to but there's a bigger one for Microsoft products too :).
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I thought about this as well and switched to Yandex which has a similar interface as gmail. I'd never thought I'd go to the Russians for privacy but they seem less likely to be subpenaed by the feds. That said, using a Russian email probably already brings it's own extra attention to me.
I thought of setting up my own server but decided it really wasn't worth the bother. Most of my friends and family use gmail, so gmail still gets their profile one me regardless of what I do.
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If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, and you're using unencrypted email (the main kind the subpoena would matter for) then you're hosed anyways. Using a Russian server guarantees that when the feds want your data, they can get it from existing government databases; potentially without bothering with that pesky subpoena paperwork.
It doesn't really seem like there is a use case. If you're happier with the service, great. More power to you. But it is basically impossible that you've increase
Re:Isn't the difference (Score:5, Insightful)
If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, you have already made far greater errors than picking the wrong email provider.
Re:Isn't the difference (Score:5, Insightful)
There is sure a lot of hate. And I can understand it to a certain extent; I've been running ad-blockers consistently since the 90s. I used to have doubleclick in my hosts file to reduce the filter load, too.
But google is the only ad company that doesn't sell your info. I hear a lot of people just shouting randomly that they are "evil," but without any real reasons. They discontinue services that I used to rely on, which is their right, and as a result I'm unlikely to adopt new services. But there is nothing evil about that, it is a straightforwards application of their own prerogatives.
All the other ad companies sell information about you. All of them. Google is the only one with the reach to even try to offer what they do, which is a system where the advertisers can target ads without any information about the targets. They are clearly way less evil than the other ad companies.
If you're going to host and run your own email, then obviously you can have more power over it. But using another corporate email provider will rarely protect any data, since you're already with the company that doesn't sell data about you. Just about everybody else does sell data, including companies that don't sell advertising. Even my mechanic leaked my phone number to some random company so they could send a TXT spam.
Just wave your hands shouting "evil" while you switch to companies that sell their data on you. That'll teach `em!
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But google is the only ad company that doesn't sell your info.
Never heard of Google analytics? What exactly do you think they are doing?
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ive been using ddg for a while now as my delfault and I really like it. I would LOVE a ddg email service. noahhaders@duck.co, how cool would that be!
Reality Flip Switch (Score:3)
ALL bubbles end badly as they are doomed to burst from day one.
Booms work on psychology of crowds until some unseen actor "flips the switch."
Re:Reality Flip Switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Booms work when the Fed floods Wall St with cash. It has to go somewhere? It ends when the realization hits and the 40:1 leveraged accounts go bust.
Then it's time for the tax payers to bail them out and start over.
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It is not just the Feds cash flood, it is the zero-rate interest. People chasing returns are practically forced into the stock market to try and get returns.
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Normal deflation isn't a big deal. The computer industry has operated under price deflation since day 1. My first computer was an Apple II GS. That thing was over $2k in the early 90's.
Also the whole industrial revolution occurred under deflation.
Now I assume you are talking about deflation right now. Yes after years of easy money a tightening will cause a bad depression. But that is the cute not the disease.
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All the opponents of deflation cite cases where there was a economic catastrophe that resulted in deflation, where they then spin it to blame all the bad things that happened on the deflation rather than the catastrophe.
Lower prices isnt bad. Period.
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Was the Fed flooding the market with cash in 2007-08? I think it was the private banks that were creating liquidity (money) with those weird investment vehicles and loans. What the Fed failed at was not withdrawing money from the economy and running up interest rates to cool things down, but nobody wants an economic party pooper and they would have been savagely criticized for ending the good times.
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The feds are still flooding the market with cash, it hasn't stopped under Obama. Remember that last major dump in trade numbers by 200-400 points a month or two back? Yeah, that was on the fear that the feds were going to stop pumping in cash.
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Was the Fed flooding the market with cash in 2007-08? I think it was the private banks that were creating liquidity (money) with those weird investment vehicles and loans. What the Fed failed at was not withdrawing money from the economy and running up interest rates to cool things down, but nobody wants an economic party pooper and they would have been savagely criticized for ending the good times.
Yes, and they still are. The interest rate is below inflation which means it is profitable for banks to loan money backed in random crap, because random crap appreciates at the rate of inflation. That is what subprime morgages was, and what is still happening because they are still allowed to loan under inflation.
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ALL bubbles end badly as they are doomed to burst from day one.
Booms work on psychology of crowds until some unseen actor "flips the switch."
Sounds like sour grapes from somebody who didn't get out in time.
I agree it doesn't always work out well for the crowd, especially in the short term. But if it ends badly depends on where you are standing at the end. If it was ending badly for your unseen actor, he wouldn't flip the switch yet.
Whatever (Score:3)
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The stock market is not a video game. For a stock to be sold there must be a real buyer. And guess what happens when a market is crashing? Lots of sellers, and no buyers. That's how you can tell that the market is crashing.
So how does your foolproof plan works? You will somehow know just before the market crash so you can sell everything, then buy it back at a huge discount because the market is dead? That's pure genius, you should send your resume to JP Morgan right away.
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"So how does your foolproof plan works?"
Buy low and sell high. The rest is up to you to research. As for "sending my resume" why should I work for someone else when I'm perfectly happy working for myself?
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By having a long term investing horizon and rebalancing periodically
Is it really a crash if nobody bought? (Score:2)
I mean basically we have $1 trillion worth of funny money from QE1-42 that has to be burned sooner or later anyway. If no actual real money is spent, is it really a valuation? Is it really a bubble?
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All money is "funny money". The gold standard is long gone.
what, Uber? (Score:5, Interesting)
That ridesharing thing that's getting sued ten ways from Sunday for butthurting established taxi firms?
Something's definitely up if they're getting valued at $40 billion! That's 4 times the UK's annual agricultural output!
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Yeah, seriously UK farmers, WTF? Get off your arses and plough some hectares!
First they laugh, then they sue, then you win (Score:2)
Uber has already won [buzzfeed.com]
I love the smell of smoldering luddites in the dawn of a new age.
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People are bored with food, transportation is still interesting.
uber (Score:2)
perhaps there will be an uber crash
Avoiding an Uber crash (Score:3)
Round and round. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember in 1998 hearing the experts all say "This time it's different we won't crash."
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Yeah, but you had the old guard saying that they didn't understand it - Warren Buffet comes to mind. And then with the housing crash you had someone as big as Goldman Sachs pulling back in 2007. This time you hear a little bit of head scratching, but it's hard to find someone with a lot of respect holding back. There was a LOT of money printed recently - this could help explain at least part of the run-up. Plus, any company that survived the market crash is probably a pretty strong company, so you have some
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And they were right, it was different. By 2001 they had cashed out. In `98 there was a clear understanding that the bubble would still grow further, because people were investing in batshit crazy stuff and the rate of investment was still accelerating.
Nobody knew exactly when the crash would come, but there were signs that the top had been reached. The only people "surprised" by the crash where people who were predicting a downward slope. It was already visibly at least near the top for months ahead. VC mon
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yes; it was called the "New Economy". A term that should be remembered for generations, in infamy. Like Hitler.
Yet - people still refer to the "New Economy" as a thing; instead of as a grim reminder of how we create buzzwords to fool ourselves into believing that "it really is different this time, and we are really a special flower."
No bubble? (Score:5, Interesting)
2006: "There's no real estate bubble..." (Score:4, Interesting)
I also figured out when the 2000 tech bubble was about to burst: I was at the local grocery store and overheard the following conversation between the clerk and bag boy as I was checking out:
<clerk>: "The manager said you don't need to come in to work tomorrow."
<bagboy>: "*chuckle* Hehe thats ok, I'll just stay home and day trade..."
I literally went home and cashed out 90% of my mutual funds after that. Unfortunately, my judgement failed me a couple months later, when I bought back in...and lost most of it...
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Counter anecdote: During the Enron Scandal (October 2001) NPR brought on an analyst who talked about it, but warned that the housing bubble was the real risk that people should be talking about, not Enron.
I believed him, I just wish I hadn't. There were many years of profiteering to be had before the bust. I was shocked that it kept rising after 2004.
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It kept rising after 2004, because Greenspan stimulated the economy with a low FED rate. When it became obvious that the rates needed to be raised in 2004, they kept them low - likely to continue funding the war; which was not paid for by tax hikes or bonds, but but was paid for with debt. This overstimulated the economy (exactly what Keynes said NOT to do with stimulus spending), which is what really created the bubble. Irresponsible manipulation of monetary policy by the Bush administration. This is w
Re:2006: "There's no real estate bubble..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh I remember this, too; in 2007; and I kept imagining that housing demand will always go up, because we're always adding more people, right?
I was naive enough that I could never conceive that we'd get to a point in this nation where vacant, foreclosed houses outnumbered homeless people 4:1. I never dreamed that our trusted financial institutions and ratings agencies would sell their credibility and AAA ratings like a crackwhore sells her virtue. Yet, post 2008 - the banks were willing to sit on empty, depreciating inventory, rather than let their fellow americans sleep indoors under a roof. Disgusting. I learned a lot since 2007.
But I'm pretty sure that when the next crash comes, everybody's going to act all surprised like they didn't see it coming, and though it could never happen like that again.
...and nobody will have to get nailed to a tree. (Score:2)
The Vogons disagreed.
The NASDAQ (Score:3)
Come on man. UBER isn't even a stock. The so-called 'valuation' is somebody's pipe dream that hasn't been exposed to the marketplace.
ALSO there will ALWAYS be stocks that are over hyped and overvalued. Cherry picking individual issues and using them to characterize the market is a fools game.
March 10 2000 the NASDAQ hit 5132.
Now the NASDAQ is still well below the 2000 high on an inflation corrected basis. Even more so considering the burgeoning size of the tech economy over 15 years.
Maybe there is an argument that things are overwrought, especially in Vulture Capitalist Fantasy Land. But bubble? Nah.
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Uber is a stock - It is just privately traded. So it is not exposed to the vigor that a second by second tick that stock market has - it is just ever so often - once or twice a year. But it has exposure to the market place.
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I was really talking up Ballard Power back in 2002.
A friend's relative made a significant investment about the same time. I'm just glad that purchase was made before I even met him, and not on my recommendation.
We both thought it was a post-bubble fire-sale steal-of-a-deal at $25. It is at currently at $2.43, which is still up somewhat compared to most of the last 10 years. Negative earnings, but they're somehow still in business.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echar... [yahoo.com]
"no bubble" =~ bubble about to burst (Score:2)
as soon as "experts", particularly media experts, start saying "no bubble" you can be pretty damn sure there is a bubble
Price/Earnings (Score:2)
It might be argued that it is a little high now, but it's not anything near to what it was before (and if it is high, it's probably due to monetary inflation rather than irrational exuberance in stock prices).
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Money is always a loan of someone. Presently, a lot came from the central banks. If they rise the price for money or reduce the size of lended money it will go bust. Money is not a real thing. It has no fixed value. Same applies to gold or any other thing you use to describe wealth. However, as long as the intrest rates are higher in the US. A lot of European money is transferred to the US, lowering the Euro which makes products from there cheaper. This allows the Germans to sell more stuff in the US increa
function({esc}) ... (Score:2)
Shadow bubble? Of course, that doesn't mean a bubble won't eventually form in tech stocks, or that one isn't already being inflated elsewhere in world of technology.
This comes at the end of TFA.
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
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The difference here is that Uber has a product. A vile, rent-seeking product built on the corpse of the American Middle Class, but a product nontheless. .
I'm finding Uber increasingly useful, as so do an increasing number of people I know who live in cities.
The drivers also seem pretty happy when you talk to them.
So, I think you're overstating how bad Uber is overall. And they may even (with luck)
have a positive role to play in making cities easier to get around and so reducing the
need for cars.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
But there's another nasty side of Uber we haven't seen yet, which is that as work becomes more and more scarce you're going to see more and more people turning to it to pay rent. It's not so much the sharing economy as the desperation economy. That's the rub. Right now there are some drivers doing OK because $12/hour seems like a lot as long as nothing goes wrong, and there's plenty to replace them when it does. But it's a larger part of the race to the bottom that the modern world's caught up in...
Uber has something the others don't (Score:2)
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I thought Uber just had a server, or a bunch of servers, and a highly fluid 'work force' that could go away in a matter of days if conditions got bad.
You're saying they have an actual product they sell and they're not just standing in the middle on a deal?
It's not a bubble, happens when fed funds=0% (Score:2)
When investors can't earn almost anything on fixed income, they pile on stocks.
In essence, if interest rates=2%, stocks=x, if interest rates=1%, stocks=2x (apreciate so they give back the same rate of return), but then there's the other way around, when interest rates starts to rise, the stock market could crash predicting the revaluing of assets.
The math isn't exactly 2%, x, 1%, 2x, there are other factors, but the basic idea is still true.
A bubble is what happened before 2008, the market was overvalued by
I'm right on this 90% of the time: (Score:2)
I predict that the future is not predictable.
The "Boeing"-rule of thumb (Score:4, Interesting)
What bubble means (Score:3)
People fail to understand is that bubbles are not bad for the people who are lucky enough to get out in time. (And, yes, it's usually simply a matter of luck.) They are only bad for everyone else.
Financial analysts are the last people with an incentive to tell people about a bubble if they suspect one.
I'm waiting for the bubble to pop (Score:2)
Then I'll be able to pick up major universities for about $1K each.
The four most dangerous words in investing. (Score:3)
"This time it's different."
Re:Oh i think its overvalued but its much differen (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is pretty much spot-on.
I remember the last bubble well. Anything with a dot-com name meant it was on the front lines of technology, and the impending everything-online economy would wipe away the old brick-and-mortar businesses who couldn't move as fast as the upcoming technology. It turns out that economics didn't move as quickly as they thought. Companies still needed a business model, and the established companies were often able to move into online business just as quickly as consumers demanded.
Tod
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I remember the bubble. I remember the headhunter saying, a murder conviction maybe I still can't find you a tech job, but if it is only manslaughter, lets talk.
Hiring is recovering. The economy is doing well. Stocks are doing well. Nothing is overheated though, wages are fairly stagnant, and few companies are getting large investments without traditional business analysis.
I wish there would be a new bubble, I dream of a new bubble, but sadly, there is no bubble. You want money, you have to earn or scam it u
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I've never really seen that. Wall Street lost their ass in the housing crash, and so did the banks. People like me who sold a house during the bubble were the ones that profited (that, and companies who built new houses.)
People who flipped houses during the bubble tended to have lost as well, I personally know of one investor who lost some 6 million dollars buying and selling houses in that time period. Though some came out on top, it was pretty rare.
Wall Street also lost their ass in the dot com collapse.
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No, granting loans increases the money supply, but it doesn't go away when it is repaid. There is no mechanism for deflation built in, because it is not a useful effect.
If there is less money *changing hands* in the system it will sure seem like there is less money. And that only happens if people stop spending. Making bad investments doesn't cause money to change hands more slowly, it makes it flow faster! Until it crashes and they freak out. Then you just issue cheap loans to get people spending. Or even,
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You dont think people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos made that money?
And you know what both of them have in common? They each run at least one business that has a viable revenue model, and a damn good one at that.
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There is no retirement. For my whole life the people who have enough money to manipulate economies have been crashing the economy and taking the average Joe six pack's 401x.
I guess that's what happens when the market crashes and you lose your 401k, it becomes your 401-ex.
Re: Gotta look at the source... (Score:5, Insightful)
You only lost your 401k if you cashed it out while the market was in the dumps. If you'd have left it where it was, like you were supposed to do, then it would have increased in value.
You're also supposed to shift your stock investments out into money market or other low-risk devices about 8 years before you plan to retire, so that the timing of the market fluctuations doesn't leave you screwed.
You see the game being rigged because you drank the propaganda and believed that when the market goes down, 401k accounts some evaporate. But they don't.
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And in your estimation how many millions of non-expert "investors" also didn't perform "correctly" with their retirement funds.
You can place blame wherever you like, but the reality of a very broke generation of retires-who-can't-retire isn't going anywhere,
While at the same time, Wall Street has never in history been this wealthy compared to median income. And the gap between haves and have nots now far exceeds where it was in the roaring 20's.
Something is wrong, and what is wrong in hhtis particular case
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Facebook, WhatIsNameApp, the list goes on and on.
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You climaxed early with "Student Loan Bubble." You could keep the gag going longer without that. It is just too laughable to keep reading after that. I did laugh, but it just felt too early.
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That's also part of the battered wife syndrome.
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I don't believe you. Short positions are a bitch to get, on most self-directed accounts it's not even possible. You need a serious account with a fat margin and a good track record with a broker to get in that business. I don't even know you and I can tell that doing that on a lot of stocks is out of your reach.
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Wrong... any numbnut with as little as $10k can margin $30k to $40k worth of equity long or short. The minute the security (or what you're borrowed to sell short) falls out of cash value you have, the broker either sells it or covers the short.
These days, selling short is even easier as you don't have to wait for a down tic to fill the order. Additionally, most brokers have sufficient inventory to loan for short sellers. The game's the same, the rules have changed to make it even less fair.
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I don't believe you. Short positions are a bitch to get
Thanks for immediately letting us know that you have nothing of value to add.
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And that is what exactly? I do not need Uber. I could use MyTaxi or even talk to someone over the phone and call for a Taxi. However, in a decent city there is something called public transport. And when I can wait 10 minutes for a cab, I can also wait for a bus or local train to bring me home for a fraction of the price. Owning a zone card. That trip would not cost me any extra. Actually every time I use public transport it is beocming cheaper.
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However, in a decent city there is something called public transport.
Well, we don't have those in the USA, except maybe NYNY. San Francisco, for example, has a pretty crap public transportation system. Unless you're actually going across town, it's faster to walk.
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As I remember, during the 1999 bubble, three digit, and even four digit P/Es were not that unusual.
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We are, and by we, I mean tech investors are far more discerning now days then before primarily because we know what it was like to get burned in the past.
Except the biggest investors, the vulture capitalists, still have no fucking idea which end to point towards enemy, let alone anything more complex. They don't have friends with brains, only friends with money. People whose every other word isn't some kind of bullshit can't stand them.