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Uber’s Still Not Profitable

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Re: Uber’s Still Not Profitable

#31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a layman, it still blows my mind that giant companies can operate at such a massive loss for so long, seemingly without any road to profitability. This is the effects of quantitative easing on our economy. We wanted to hypercharge our economy and encourage investments after the 2008 crash, but now things have become too bubbly. A lot of these companies that exist today are functionally useless / wastes of money…

Wasn’t QE introduced to deal with the last round of this? I think the real problem has been the way wealth has been concentrating since the 1980s — the thing all of this has in common from the dotcom bubble on has been wealthy people sitting on huge piles of cash but looking for high return “investments” rather than building real businesses. The first real estate bubble was fueled in part by the large sovereign oil f…

> Wasn’t QE introduced to deal with the last round of this?

The opposite. QE is an inflationary policy, much like lowering interest rates. As the central bank buys up debts in the open market, QE makes loans easier, meaning more companies get cheaper debt to finance their operations.

That is: QE inflates the bubble further. Arguably needed in the 2010-era to help us recover from the 2008 recession, we are beginning to see the ill-effects of this policy today. Which is fine, there's a time and place for all of these policies, and the rising interest rates will counteract the ill effects of that.

Its a question of "how hard to push the deflation buttons". Pushing too hard risks a difficult recession, pushing too lightly means inflation will get out of whack.

Re: Uber’s Still Not Profitable

#32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t QE introduced to deal with the last round of this? I think the real problem has been the way wealth has been concentrating since the 1980s — the thing all of this has in common from the dotcom bubble on has been wealthy people sitting on huge piles of cash but looking for high return “investments” rather than building real businesses. The first real estate bubble was fueled in part by the large sovereign oil f…

> Wasn’t QE introduced to deal with the last round of this? The opposite. QE is an inflationary policy, much like lowering interest rates. As the central bank buys up debts in the open market, QE makes loans easier, meaning more companies get cheaper debt to finance their operations. That is: QE inflates the bubble further. Arguably needed in the 2010-era to help us recover from the 2008 recession, we are beginning t…

> QE inflates the bubble further. Arguably needed in the 2010-era to help us recover from the 2008 recession, we are beginning to see the ill-effects of this policy today.

This is what I was referring to: my understanding was that QE was used to take most of the sting out of the 2008 collapse, but a key driver of the mortgage fraud was all of the people who lost money on unwise dotcom decisions seeking more “safe” higher-yield investments than actually existed.

Re: Uber’s Still Not Profitable

#33
post #11

So let me see if I get this. Uber has been struggling to become profitable and this blog has gone to town many times making fun of Uber for not being really profitable. Finally, Uber does the only thing that can get it profitable: raise prices and control costs. And this blog finds a way to complain again, saying that it " Uber transferred $2.8b from its drivers to its shareholders". Of course, any company that makes…

> So let me see if I get this ... finally, Uber does the only thing that can get it profitable: raise prices and control costs. And this blog finds a way to complain again

What he's saying is that this isn't what they did - their profitability is a balance sheet artefact caused by Uber selling parts of itself off (and incidentally getting over-inflated shares as payment). The main problem with this is that the bits of a company they sell off can only be sold off once.

The fundamentals of the business remain, and despite improvements in revenue vs expenses the reported profitability (using dubious accounting) is no more than a one-off event which they can only repeat by selling more of the family silver and not by running their actual business.

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