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WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

mattstoller.substack.com

411–420 of 440 posts

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that private investors need protection, it's that legitimate businesses have to compete against their fountain of capital and that all of these companies employ a lot of people.

The model of driving every profitable company out of business by undercutting on price to a massive per unit loss, funded by venture capital, in an attempt to corner the market and have a pseudo-monopoly is bad for "the public" in the long run.

It's bad for "the public" in the short run also, because competitor companies are employers and they can't afford to compete in the short run.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand (you obviously seem to get it). WeWork is basically a hybrid bank/retailer. They take big, complex, slow-moving long-term commitments, just like a car rental company or a bank, and repackage them into shorter-term, small commitments, while managing risk and adding a bunch of value-added services. I don't know about all this governance stuff or their growth rat…

Doesn't an REIT (that "might be a viable business") fit your description as well?

No, it's a completely different thing.

A REIT owns real estate assets.

WeWork doesn't need to own assets, they're an intermediary that does something economically useful.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#413
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but what about the not so rare times explained in my original comment when returns on tangible private marginal assets become negative (on a risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted basis)? During the financial crisis of 2008, the tailor rule put the natural rate (a rate correlated with private marginal safe asset returns) at as low as -4%. In those conditions, having a currency that returns 0% risk free gets you way ab…

> The fact that crypto coins in a free market tend towards increasing volatility makes them not very good as a medium of account to negotiate contracts and conduct business. Crypto volatility is not solely or even primarily because of the coins' deflationary natures. In fact some cryptos ("shitcoins") are not deflationary at all, and have their value regularly inflated by a central authority. Note that my comment sai…

Gold is very volatile (sure not as much as cryptocoins) and this is for the best as gold volatility prevents it from hurting the macro-economy.

You think poor people get a better deal getting a few bucks a year of returns on the little savings that they have while being forced to indirectly fund a much larger subsidy on rich people's wealth, a subsidy that is given specifically to the those who get out of the private markets in favor of holding government paper, that close down businesses and lay these poor people off?

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#415

> WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses. > This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs coul…

It's more like this "blitzscaling" system is sort of a ponzi scheme. Keep taking money from investor after investor until MAYBE you have a massive payday.

BUT.. you haven't actually proven that it's viable business market.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#416
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defending those of poor character and moral fiber (not my judgement, facts reported) from a jab about their clothes is low priority. The other issues presented are far more pressing.

Making pointless jabs at somebody dilutes your argument and makes you look like a moron in the eyes of bystanders on the margins of deciding who's right.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In comparison to nearly any other tenant, they are quite large and also structured quite differently. Other large tenants put similar pressure on tenants, with the clearest example I can think of being anchor grocery stores in strip malls. The issue is not that landlords can't relet the space, but in the additional cost and the lost revenue of doing so. WeWork has large blocks of space, and in many cities, multiple l…

Many of those pressures also apply to WeWork staying in the same place. For WeWork to leave a lot of space behind that means they are taking a lot of space elsewhere (or going out of business) Of course they can leave one space behind no problem, but that happens all the time. (though less valuable places may run into problems it was the same problem they had before). Large tenants leave all the time, it is a cost of…

I don't think it's about WeWork leaving like a normal tenant, but simply shutting down a given location.

>Large tenants leave all the time, it is a cost of business: you factor that into the lease terms.

Big tenants leaving is something that takes a lot of effort to manage. If a tenant is potentially giving back 100k sqft at the end of the lease a landlord is going to be getting in front of that years in advance by determining renewal probability, engaging with brokers to find tenants that might be in the market, and possibly actively marketing the space even while the tenant is still occupying the space. Even with that lead time, that space still might be vacant for 6 months to a year, and that's in decent market. This is all because larger tenants don't move at the same pace medium or smaller tenants do.

As far as being factored into the leases, the way WeWork structures their leases is such that the break even point for a the landlord is farther into the future that most of their typical leases. This is mostly due to the significant build out work that WeWork does their best to get the landlords to subsidize, and the amount of free rent they ask for on the front end. Therefore, if WeWork goes dark before year 5 of their lease, then the landlord has likely lost money on that lease.

When it comes to the landlord taking over the short term rentals, some probably will, some maybe won't. Who knows if the tenants will be interested in that or whether the landlords will make enough money for it to be worth their while, but these kinds of short term rentals are not the kind of business landlords want to be in.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Both of these numbers are surprising to me, can you source them? Particularly the first one, which I assume is a global measure, and I'd be interested to know what % of North American e-commerce Amazon controls. I wager I could walk outside my home and ask 100 people on the sidewalk to name one e-commerce site and f…

I'm not the original commenter, but here's two sources [1] [2] for the 50% number, with [1] saying this represents 5% of US retail sales. It's 50% of US e-commerce. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/12/amazon-to-take-almost-50-per...

Thanks very much. Some great other replies to my question in this thread as well.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#419
post #416
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making pointless jabs at somebody dilutes your argument and makes you look like a moron in the eyes of bystanders on the margins of deciding who's right.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think you’re replying to the wrong account?

I’m confused what rules my comment breaks.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it's not competing on price. It's competing on cost, a result of which is often, but not necessarily, a lower price point. Business strategy courses explicitly teach you that simply competing on price (that is, simply lowering prices in hopes that you'll beat the competition), will blow up in your face. A classic example (presented to my MBA class) was the two adjacent pizza parlors in NYC competing on pr…

I had the same example in my class... purple pride represent?

Something something... "Go Cats!"
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