Baldur Bjarnason8h ago

The US basically isn't enforcing a whole host of laws and regulations regarding finance (hasn't since the 2007 bubble, even less so these days) which means the current bubble probably has a bunch of fraud going on—sorry, "poor information environment" is, I think, the euphemism du jour

Since online advertising has basically been filled with I Can't Believe This Is Legal™ fraud-adjacent behaviour for years, I'm personally taking the numbers coming out of tech with a grain of salt

Jimmy Jim8h ago
Show threadBaldur Bjarnason

The difference between the tech industry and, say, Enron is that the tech industry is a cluster of very large, deeply intertwined megacorporations. They're like the 2007 era banks in terms of their interconnectedness: big tech orbiting Nvidia and smaller startups orbiting the big tech planets.

You only need fraud to thrive in one corner of this system to create a cascading risk for them all.

11:09amWeb
Show threadCraig P8h ago
@baldur i think fraud has become the defining feature of this era, yeah.
Show threadarrbee6h ago
@baldur
One problem is that those megacorporations are mature, stable companies who should have a P/E ratio to match. As this would lower their share price they frantically adopt any new tech to convince the market they should have the ratio of a successful startup.
The alternative is lower value share options and having to pay real money instead of shares to buy out competitors - which they will do anything to avoid.
The actual profitability of a company is no longer important to its "value".
Show threadBob Thomson6h ago
@baldur @Zitron has lots on this, the fantasy numbers and how it differs from
Dot com, 2008 and Enron, and is, if anything worse.
Show threadPratik Patel5h ago
@baldur I'm pretty sure you're going to get "too big to fail" problems.