Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be shocked if they were able to maintain those margins. They’ve faced relatively little competition in the EV space until this point and benefited from a shortage juicing prices. As demand eases and more entrants come into the EV space, they will have to lose margin, market share, or both.
> I would be shocked if they were able to maintain those margins. I wouldn't be. They have fundamental and very broad patents on important things like: * Pre-heating the battery on the way to a charging stop (enables the battery to accept faster charging without damage on road trips) * Using motor waste heat for battery heating (increases range while use the above strategy) * Dynamically adjusting charge rates due to…
Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
491–500 of 774 posts
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also a central banking fail in so far that there's that much liquidity in the market that can't find a productive outlet. There's a lot of money, but also not enough concentrated in one spot to do really useful ventures like large infrastructure projects. So instead the money is distorting everything. Imagine if lending was less cheap for home owners but it was still cheap for governments or really large comp…
why is the housing market not budging. Its just lagging other assets?
Housing always lags, usually by 18-24 months. Real estate transactions are slow - they require a bunch of research, non-fungible goods in an illiquid market, physically scoping out properties, financing sources that are notoriously sluggish and thorough in their diligence, and a slow closing process. And the sellers don't need to sell - they can just hold onto their places and live in them or rent them out. That means that when money dries up in the housing market, liquidity dries up before prices drop: people just hold onto their houses and don't sell them rather than take the loss.
This also means that housing is pretty resilient to recessions that last 4 years or so in a regional economy to make a serious dent in housing prices.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#493Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
They mean paying in full themselves, not backed by mortgage.
Even if you get the mortgage, it's the same as cash to the seller. The bank just cut's them a check right away. The mortgage is between the bank and the buyer.
>>Even if you get the mortgage, it's the same as cash to the seller.
Not really, pay in 'cash' and you can close in days, pay with a mortgage and it might take weeks to months. Sellers always prefer cash buyers if they are in a hurry to sell.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#495This has been a long time coming. Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane. There…
Tesla made more money last quarter than Ford, GM and Toyota. Toyota made 10x the number of cars as Tesla. Tesla is growing vehicle production 50% YoY, while growing profit even faster (having barely hit economies of scale yet). Tesla has a backlog of orders approaching a year in many regions. Everyone else is losing money on their EVs and can't make them in volume production, can't find the batteries for them, becaus…
Tesla’s source of profit is mainly from 2 things:
- they’re selling cars that have quality of $25k cars for $60k
- they’re basically a first manufacturer that sells Chinese made cars to western world at scale (all their other operations are either not ramped up or unprofitable)
Power of their brand is insane. But they seem to be mainly raiding it and diminishing it. Music will likely stop one day.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
My intuition is that those are 3 of the select few companies that are not in a bubble. I would add Google and Amazon to that list too. They make insane amounts of money and continue growing at a steady pace. Apart from Facebook, they have all shown the capability to expand into other verticals and successfully end up as major player on a consistent basis. This sets a high ceiling on growth despite being country sized…
> Nvidia, Unity, Cloudflare and similar companies with products with tangible value will survive most downturns. Non-ads based companies that extract value on the margin will struggle in this bear market. Yes. Cloudflare was a very good buy signal 2 days ago. [0] Now it has gone up again. Most likely a short term upwards side, but I wanted to tell everyone about it, but I was downvoted to hell and beaten up for my co…
I love cloudflare. I see them becoming as big as AWS/Azure/GCP etc. They are moving fairly quickly but extremely deliberately and I agree with you that them being down recently has been a great time to buy.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We could allocate resources When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistributed. That cash still exists. The resources being allocated are graphics cards, human time, and electricity AFAICT. The power usage of crypto is relatively small compared to other active human endeavors. It's power usage doesn't approach other arbitrary value s…
IIRC, the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system, if not higher. I don't know how gold mining ranks, but it may be well below crypto mining in energy use or well above. Mining energy use depends a lot on asset price, and gold prices are comparatively low (compared to other asset classes). Silicon and other electronic parts also get dumped into this market, when the…
> the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system
That is an unbelievable statement just on the face of it.
But if we say: "What is the energy use per transaction?" what then?
The inefficiency of crypto currency is legendary.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Federal Reserve banks are.
No they are not, though it's easy to understand the confusion. From the SF Feds website: The Board of Governors—Located in Washington, D.C., Board members are appointed by the U.S. President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Board members and staff are civil service employees. The 12 regional Reserve Banks—Located around the country, the 12 Federal Reserve Banks are chartered as private corporations. Employees are no…
They are not part of the government. They are more senior than that, they are part of the elite.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#499This has been a long time coming. Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane. There…
Over a long enough time frame the stock market and even the whole economy behaves like a pyramid scheme as it is dependent on new generations to be more people than the previous one.
I think you're right but I don't think it has to be that way.
Like others, up until a few years ago, I was a Keynesian. But then I realized that if you allow inflation you're not just "rewarding investment", but you're taking non-participation off the table -- and that's a big problem. Because then people participate in markets not based on value but because they have no choice. That means that you go from value investing to "growth investing" -- which is another name for pyramid scheme and people unironically saying that "the market always goes up."
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
The central bank doesn't control policies like that though. They have scant few actual knobs to turn on their own without Congressional intervention.
The fed actually has more tools than the ones it currently uses, some of which have been used in the past. Robert Hockett has written a lot about productive investments via the federal reserve banks, and how that could be used to transform the economy. Here's one recent paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4023614 He wrote a short book about it as well: https://www.amazon.com/Financing-Green-New…
Thanks for the links. I'll pick up that book.
One thing I've been a long-time advocate for is States setting up their own banks akin to that of North Dakota's. If for no other reason than to have a way to leverage national monetary policy for regional aims, so that when the Federal government rushes to the aid of Wall Street (e.g. by flooding it with cheap liquidity) there's a way for State governments to more directly interact with those mechanisms themselves for their benefit.
I strongly suspect significant challenges in setting up effective and responsive governance and incentive structures to keep such things from not becoming their own instruments of abuse, but ever since watching 2008 unfold it's bothered me how easy it is to leave States twisting in the wind while the balance sheets of financial institutions are made whole by feeding at the Fed liquidity trough.
One of the basic premises of "States rights", as it were, is that it's supposed to offer lots of little "laboratories of democracy", but as it stands right now there's no good way to actually finance those laboratories to invest in ambitious things. So, what we mostly end up with instead is only the downside of using "States rights" in the only way that it's cheap to do so, which is usually by restricting or denying things. It's much harder to get the upside of investing in things without all the latitude that the Federal government enjoys financially.