Slashdot Mirror
Do Big-Money Acquisitions Mean We're In a Tech Bubble?
Nerval's Lobster writes "When a major IT company pays a reported $30 million—roughly 90 percent of it in cash—for an iOS app with no monetization strategy and a million downloads since launch, is that a sign that the tech industry as a whole is riding a massive, overinflated bubble? Yahoo isn't alone, by a long shot: over the past couple years, a few apps have been snatched up for enormous sums—think Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012, or Google buying Sparrow for a reported $25 million. Nor has the money train stopped there: in a pattern that recalls the late-90s market frothiness for anyone over the age of 28, a handful of tech companies have either launched much-hyped IPOs or witnessed their share price skyrocket into the stratosphere. But does all this IPO activity and app-acquiring actually mean 'bubble'?"
get it while the gettins' good, save the money - don't blow it, then get out
rinse and repeat, pt barnum was right
Yes, it is a bubble, but it's not simply a tech bubble, it's money bubble this time. It's all inflation, people are looking for place to park value.
For all the Keynesians that deny one of the 3 major functions of money (storage of value), that's what you do when you print and print without regard to the actual purchasing power - you force people to look into alternative ways of storing purchasing power, and obviously with the interest rates being pushed down by this same action by the Fed and other central banks around the world, there is no yield.
Savers, investors are in a search of yield and they can't find it. That's how bubbles form. While the Fed is trying hard to reflate the housing bubble it doesn't really control what the inflation goes into and when it comes rushing out, so it results in higher stock market prices, higher asset prices that go up in bidding wars, whatever people can think of, anything that is not the paper printed by the central banks.
It will burst, what will be the second worst of the bad is unclear right now but the worst of the bad will be USD denominated debt, bonds, dollars themselves.
You can't handle the truth.
No.
Insane financial valuation theories mean we're in a bubble. Big money acquisitions can happen for a number of reasons. A lot of them are side effects of the insane theories. This one isn't.
They didn't pay $30 million for the App with no monetization potential, the second sentence of the first link is "Yahoo said it plans to close down the actual app and use the algorithmic summation technology". They paid $30 million for his algorithm and to hire the talented mind that conceived it. I don't know what's unique about his algorithm or it's results, but that's what the acquisition was about, not the app. Apparently it can do something Yahoo's wanted to do but was unable to accomplish. It may have been a bargain.
The first sentence of the summary contains a claim invalidated by the second sentence of the link. Seriously? Not even the submitter or the editor could RTFA?
We've been in a bubble economy-wide since the crash of 2007. It's (more or less) intentional, fueled by artificially low interest rates and the Fed pouring money into the banking system. That money has no place to go, so it goes into whatever's trendy at the moment - whether there's real value there or not.
Everyone (again - more or less) agrees that the economy needed the stimulus, but a better approach would have been to pump the money into the economy via smartly targeted (or even non so smartly targeted) direct government spending. Funded, if possible, by new revenue streams themselves defined to have little effect on employment and other economic activity. But we don't have either a functioning market economy or a functioning democracy capable of managing the economy through the political system. So we go from bubble to bubble - or crash to crash, depending on how you view it.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
It is in their best interest to take advantage of any loophole, just as normal people would go to a tax accountant to get the most money for our tax return. To do otherwise is silly. Do you really pay more taxes than you should?
If there are loopholes in tax laws, then our representatives should fix those. But our representatives don't represent us, they represent the corporations which spend money lobbying. Perhaps the Onion piece about America hiring a lobbyist is what we should do to get some representation...
Keynesians criticizing other Keynesians for being Keynesians. If you all backed off and shut it and let the damn thing crash, we could get back to having a stable market after we pick the pieces up. Keep hoisting that piano higher while the rope continues to fray...
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I saw the housing bubble. In 2006, specifically, when working as a programmer for a mortgage titling company. I just saw the numbers going into the database and realized that there's no possible way this could work in the long term - there were tons of refinanced loans for lower monthly payments that did nothing to pay back the principal, which more-or-less guaranteed that eventually the borrower couldn't pay.
I could see it, and I wasn't trained to see it or supposed to be looking for it. But it was there plain as day.
I am officially gone from
If I make $30,000,000 a year in wages, I pay 30%+ taxes on it. If I buy something for $30,000,000, I pay 0% in taxes (it's a purchase), if I sell something for a $30,000,000 profit and deduct nothing, I pay 15% taxes on it, and it's not hard to deduct $30,000,000 off a sale profit. If it's in a properly set up holding company, I pay 0% tax on it, even with no deductions. And yes, anyone moving $30,000,000 around does it through holding companies and trusts. Likely a $30,000,000 profit will generate $0 in tax.
People don't get how the truly rich work. They live by a completely different set of rules that even the rich wannabe can't comprehend.
Learn to love Alaska