Uber's billion-dollar losses expose the fragile state of the on-demand economy
Uber is an example of what happens when central banks attempt to 'stimulate' the economy through misguided central planning. By forcing down interest rates and essentially moving spending from the future into the present, they're stimulating investment in general. But what they forget (or more likely, choose to ignore) is that investments can be just bad investments.Uber is a bad investment. There is no barrier to entry in ride sharing. Drivers can install multiple hailing apps. Riders can too. Building a real time ridesharing engine is not hard - I did it once as a prototype years ago but it was unfortunately in the pre-smartphone era and you had to find ride matches using your regular computer.So central banks print money in order to buy up safe investments. That forces institutional investors to pour their money into risky investments like venture capital firms. VC firms look around at a field with slim pickings but that torrent of money has to go somewhere, so it ends up being used to fight vast unsustainable price wars. And in the end people's savings that they will depend on in retirement don't end up invested in productive assets that'll yield ROI into the future .... their money ends up subsidising a 10 minute taxi ride and being lost forever.The people who run Uber may feel that they 'have' to do this otherwise their competitors would do so instead, but that just reinforces how hopeless the situation is: they know perfectly well that their main competitive advantage is illusory, or at best, is merely a result of better access to capital flows. All it'll take is a sustained set of interest rate hikes and the end of QE, and suddenly Uber will have to charge the real underlying market rates. How will it end?