After 2008 I became interested with crashes throughout history. There are so many fascinating little details that added up to one giant mess.
There’s a great scene where the CEO of a Goldman-style bank is recapping the last 100+ years of global financial collapses and he mentions, “we just can’t help ourselves.”
One of the best banking movies I’ve ever seen. Jeremy Irons absolutely nails his role.
Seth Bregman: Do you think we're gonna be wrong?
Will Emerson: [long pause] No, they're all f-d.
(edited for language)
In the short term: I don't see what the problem is with growing debt at this point.
Oh and, btw, the FED will never repay its balance sheet. It's just not going to happen, ever, under any circumstances.
Which gets me to my, seemingly rather unique, position: this is not a financial crisis (at least not yet). There's problems yes, but there's also a lot of money to solve them. Which means they will get solved, quickly. And just because we're recovering from the mother of all supply crunches and the numbers are going down to readjust, we see a lot of models crying "recession". There is no real recession. There's a recession in money paid for things. There's no recession in physical goods being distributed, quite the opposite. People aren't suddenly vastly more indebted (like in 2008) than they can be.
There was such a big problem with supply and demand that when we all collectively decided to take away to artificial roadblocks, which turned out to be the point some idiot Russian decides to use to ... and supply and demand had such a big and such a wide ranging adjustment to make that it took the the law of supply and demand ~12-18 months to adjust prices, of which some 6-8 months are still in the future. Now supplier prices are adjusting down, not for housing, not for finance, but for everything else, and everybody cries recession. Wrong. Supply just shot through the roof and demand is actually rising. The same refrain is seen everywhere. Prices for X ROCKETED up, and are coming back down rather quickly. Take your pick cars, flights, food, chips, ... There are confusing factors, such as with housing: people have been using SUBSIDISED money for housing and this is being wound down, people are getting kicked out of the housing they're in. So ... lots of complaints. But this is actually an indication, of course, of too much demand, not too little. Too much demand, too much people yelling here's money, now give me ... This shouldn't lead to a recession!
Of course my problem is ... I'm "fighting the FED". The FED disagrees with me. Of course. I'm fighting JUST the Fed at this point. I'm still on the side of the ECB, BOJ and PBOC ...
I imagine that people who work in finance would like it even less than I did.
I’d also watched Inside Job not long prior and really enjoyed it, but others found it too dry. Different strokes I guess.
I love the way Irons’ character catches the glance and says, “you’re speaking to me Mr. Sullivan.”
I would recommend looking into Jeremy Grantham. Not saying he's right about everything, but he really views himself as a "bubble historian" and he's got some great commentary on bubbles and crashes.
Interestingly, his experience during the dot com bubble and crash is pretty fascinating. He saw the bubble pretty clearly, but he got out early which caused his investors to withdraw something like half of his assets under management. He was eventually proven right of course, and his strategies did very well during the crash.
Which also points out why diversifying can be emotionally difficult. If you're well diversified you should expect to do worse than the market when it's booming, and better than the market when it's crashing (i.e less volatility). The problem with that for money managers is that it's very easy for clients to feel "Hey, the market is exploding, and I'm paying this person who is underperforming the market!", and then, when the market falls, even if the manager overperforms the market (but still has negative returns) "I'm paying this person but he's doing worse than if I just kept my assets in cash!"
Surprisingly, it didn’t work outside of the Bay area. Some entrepreneurs have difficulty seeing the world’s situation beyond their local horizon.
Competition from local supermarket is too strong. I can get freshly squeezed juice from the store machine anytime I want for cheap.
Relatedly, I have no idea how “Joe and The Juice” stores remain in business. They’re in super valuable real estate in cities across the country and as far as I can tell never have anyone in them.
On other their products likely have such margin it might be possible with enough sales. The components aren't too expensive, there isn't massive number of labour and equipment isn't that big of investment either likely...
Reasonable deal for a lot of people, given that you're only overpaying on a thing that costs a tenner.
Honest question: Do startup millionaires still go shopping themselves? I imagine when you are between the area where you have a gardner for time-to-time tasks and don’t have “un majordome” yet to serve you at any time, there’s an entire higher-class-market-but-not-elites who would be interested in Juicero?
I have a friend that worked there so I even tried the product. I thought the idea was vastly overpriced, but it definitely had the chance of working. Lots of people are into green juice vs fruit juice and they were trying to create a new market.
This is a distinction without a difference. It doesn't matter what the juice is called. It doesn't change the fact that it's idiotic to pay hundreds of dollars for a machine that just squeezes bags of fruits and vegetables, and needs an Internet connection to ensure you're locked in to only squeezing the company's pricy bags.
And that was for those of us that were literary in digital stuff and comfortable with the internet. A lot of people just hadn’t gotten around to using it much yet.
It just wasn’t time yet. And there wasn’t any massive network effect or lock-in to capture like there was with something like a social network.
Being too early is the same thing as being wrong.
- Cement is extremely perishable.
- Contruction projects need cement at very precise times.
- When that precise time will occur is hard to predict -- construction projects have a lot of delays.
- In a city there are a lot of construction projects at any given time.