The Economy

Or perhaps in the world of reality people don't run their businesses based on guesswork about an unknown future that has been highly manipulated. You know what demand for what you do looks like today, and you do what you need to to meet it because nobody turns customers and revenue away if they can help it.

Nobody could tell you with certainty what the 2023 would look like in 2021. They knew what 2021 looked like. just as right now, they know what 2023 is looking like.

The irony in your "we thought the pandemic would last forever" thing is that ... when the pandemic hit and everything shut down, it should have destroyed demand for what these businesses offer. But there was call from a lot of people for our government to essentially helicopter drop trillions of dollars (with a central bank monetizing the debt it entailed), which created a phony, distorted environment (for which the boom-bust it led to is not even the worst aspect of the price we are going to pay for it, and that is a whole other discussion although I tried to have it at the time). Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. were just operating within that environment, responding to the incentives in front of them exactly as the people who wanted the "stimulus" were hoping for.

Which is why the "we thought" thing is kind of ridiculous. These businesses have been operating in such an artificial environment, particularly since the financial crisis, but really gone bonkers when Covid created an excuse to prop up a debt bomb that was already about to explode. For more than a decade and a half, every time you thought, "They can't keep acting so recklessly," when they tried to extricate themselves from debt monetization and the stock market buckled a little or the bond market started seizing up, they stepped back in with an even bigger intervention. Which is why in 2021, there was really no way to know what financial conditions (what affects your business more than anything) would look like in 2023.

In 2013, the Federal Reserve was trying to get out of the stimulus business. They announced that they were going to start to reduce the volume of the bond purchases that had created an artificial economic environment. They were so vocal about it and did it so far in advance because like the up down roller coaster I was trying to describe, they knew they had created an artificial boom (to prop up the debt crisis that they didn't allow to fully happen during the financial crisis), and they were afraid of the bust that stopping the stimulus might lead to.

Using your rationale, a business should have been saying, "Oh well, the artificiality can't last forever. We should start planning for next year and the year beyond in which the economic environment isn't going to be juiced anymore, and set up our business to run lean."

The thing is. ... when the Fed tried to stop, there was a "taper tantrum," the bond market started to buckle, the economy started to show signs of strain and a debt crisis. ... and before they even began tapering, the Fed did the exact opposite and launched another massive round of bond purchases to the tune of another $1.5 trillion by 2015, which created the exact opposite business environment from what I was saying above.

This how businesses have been conditioned over the last decade plus. It's the reason for the "bad news is good news" thing you were marveling at earlier on this thread.

 

Up next, Spotify: Spotify to Cut 6% of Its Staff in Latest Tech Layoffs

 

Maybe when the cost of money isn't being price fixed to be so artificially low, people get more prudent about how they allocate their suddenly more precious capital.

AltSpaceVR was a start up with a "story," right as QE was pushing savers and incentizing speculators to fund riskier and riskier things.

I thought it was on the verge of bankruptcy and Microsoft picked it up for nothing, so unlike Meta, which has flittered away billions of dollars on an uncertain future, at least Microsoft isn't out that much for the flyer they took.