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Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

latimes.com

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Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#2
As someone who built the most popular iOS / Android app for Lending Club investors [0], I can tell you that since the CEO resigned

- New users have fallen by 50% per month, although of course users to my app are a fraction of total new users, but you can extrapolate

- Total net, users are withdrawing about as much money as users are putting in

- The amount of loans purchased has dropped significantly

So without a doubt, retail investors know what's going on and fear for the safety of their investments.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lendingclub-order/id10461141...

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#3
In just world this would result in a prison sentence, banishment from stock exchanges, and revocation of their corporate charter. The fact that there is no capital punishment for companies, especially public ones, provides a moral hazard.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#4
Stock's up 7% as I write this. I'm assuming nothing has been revealed that isn't already at least suspected, and layoffs are generally good for a stock's price. I've already made money on one dip-and-bounce, but currently in at 4.88, so here's hoping it will claw it's way back a little bit. I'm in no way qualified to declare a bottom, but I'm guessing all of the bad news is out of the way. This in no way constitutes investment advice; in fact, I'd steer clear of LC if I were you. But I'm not you, I'm me, and sometimes I invest poorly.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#8

Wow, so the crown of the "fintech" movement is just as bad as the banks, and the two biggest Silicon Valley successes of the last decade, Uber and AirBnB, are really just cases of massively successful regulatory arbitrage. Nice innovation!

It seems a common way to "disrupt" a market is to find a loophole to call yourself something else so you can avoid all the laws everyone else is beholden to that were put in place for people's protection.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#9

Wow, so the crown of the "fintech" movement is just as bad as the banks, and the two biggest Silicon Valley successes of the last decade, Uber and AirBnB, are really just cases of massively successful regulatory arbitrage. Nice innovation!

People have dreamt about on-demand car hailing for a long time, but it's always been a pipe dream - building the two-sided network is such too hard and too expensive, and a small network is just not worth using as a consumer. How is this not innovation?

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#10
The latest disclosures Tuesday, uncovered by a company probe, found that in the last few weeks of December 2009, Laplanche and three relatives took out 32 loans for a total of $722,800. All but three of those loans were repaid in full over the next two months, implying they were taken out to artificially goose Lending Club’s loan origination numbers.

If true, would that be considered fraud?

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