Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest Pace on Record

Re:Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest... by est31 on Friday April 24, 2020 @11:00AM (#22968667)

And dividends/buybacks are a reasonable choice. It moves the choice of whether to invest into new markets to the investors instead of dictating it from above. Companies like Google are blown out of proportion in comparison to the part that actually makes the money, all in order to find the next toothbrush product that may never come. The core Google products barely changed in the last 5 years, yet the employee count almost doubled. Great for the engineers who get the cushy 200k comp jobs, but not great for investors.

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Re:Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest... by tomweingarten on Friday April 24, 2020 @11:33AM (#22969080)

Even if we take at face value the idea that the products have barely changed, which I completely disagree with, this explanation vastly underestimates how many engineers it takes to scale the infrastructure it takes to run Google Search, Google Cloud, YouTube, etc.

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Re:Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest... by basch on Friday April 24, 2020 @12:26PM (#22969824)

Saying "Google hasnt changed" is somewhat of a disservice to what Alphabet is. Its an investment firm / publicly traded venture capital stock, and one of their main holdings is Google. Their future growth potential is much more than just Google, despite Google being their current source of revenue. I would hope, over time, Google Ads being 80% of Alphabets revenue drops and drops, and if I were investing in Alphabet that would be the reason, not to buy into Ad Words ownership.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliviergarret/2019/09/27/if-you...

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Re:Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest... by codeisawesome on Friday April 24, 2020 @12:08PM (#22969582)

> The core Google products barely changed in the last 5 years

Frontend development and UI updates are not the only way progress is made on the technical infrastructure in technology companies. How do we know that Google isn't battling an adversarial web with 1000s of engineers just to keep the search quality where it is? It must be quite an arms race to behold between Google teams and the coordinated and well motivated spammers, scammers and other bad actors (who also might be leveraging automation, AI and more!)

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Re:Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest... by compiler-guy on Friday April 24, 2020 @12:13PM (#22969643)

Google annual revenue in billions of dollars[1]:

        Revenue
  2019: 160.74    
  2018: 136.36
  2017: 110.55
  2016:  89.98
  2015:  74.54

Google's stock price is well over double today compared to five years ago--and that's even after the recent volatility. It is quite far ahead of the S&P 500 over those five years.

If you think that's "not great for investors", then I don't know what to tell you.

It's a little hard to eyeball, but profits per employee has been on a long upward trend too, except for 2019, where it fell substantially, but note the revenue gains above--that didn't just magically appear [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-hiring-binges-...

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Re:Fed Prints Another $205B This Week, M2 Growing at Fastest... by aaaxyz on Friday April 24, 2020 @11:05AM (#22968735)

Also great for all the managers and VPs who get to put on their CV that they managed a team of n engineers that worked on X to increase Y key metric by an insignificant amount or that they created a new product that will get the can in 9 months

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