Re:Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B
by jollybean on Sunday August 01, 2021 @10:25PM
(#28032267)
+1. This is the real comment about the situation, because the valuation is so 'ridiculous', it almost makes the nature of the business activity secondary.
For non-financial folks, dust off the little equation you may have learned in high school, where you value something that goes out forever, but where the rate of growth is higher than that of inflation and the risk-free cost of capital. It goes to infinity. So as interest rates go down, valuations grow. But as interest rates really get low ... the valuations vault into the stratosphere.
Only in a weird universe can we really expect these companies to grow at those rates for very long periods of time ahead of absolutely everything else without much risk.
So the discussion is really about markets, less so local types of consumer payments.
For non-financial folks, dust off the little equation you may have learned in high school, where you value something that goes out forever, but where the rate of growth is higher than that of inflation and the risk-free cost of capital. It goes to infinity. So as interest rates go down, valuations grow. But as interest rates really get low ... the valuations vault into the stratosphere.
Only in a weird universe can we really expect these companies to grow at those rates for very long periods of time ahead of absolutely everything else without much risk.
So the discussion is really about markets, less so local types of consumer payments.