Continuations

There are many terrific analyses of the WeWork IPO filing out there. One thing I have not read is someone pointing out how there is a possibility that this all works, despite the hokum language and the eye popping capital requirements, simply because we have created $3 trillion more dollars in the US alone (with equally massive central bank money creation in Europe and in China). On my blog I have been complaining about valuations as far back as I can remember but when interest rates approach...

I wrote last September about the competing views around deflation versus inflation. Interestingly, about 9 months later we still seem don’t seem to have real clarity on the subject. Over that time we have approached deflation but there has also been a ton of government intervention, which has prompted op-eds predicting future inflation and even a new fund run by Mark Spitznagel (a long time collaborator of “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb) to bet on inflation. On the other hand have been resp...

I have written a fair bit about inflation in the past, starting with a post about inflation versus deflation during the financial crises in 2008, which I then followed with three posts in 2009. We are now finding ourselves in 2014 and so far there are no signs of inflation. That would seem to say that Paul Krugman had this one right and people who were worried about inflation had it wrong. Then again that would be a classic case of a turkey argument where we confuse an absence of evidence (it...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday is about the risk of inflation. I spend much of my time thinking about company valuations, both as we make new investments and also as we try to mark valuations in existing companies. Of course valuations for private companies are influenced by available public comps and those have been trading at high multiples, including the current crop of IPOs. Now there are two countervailing views in the market. One view is that valuations will return to lower historical mu...