The argument against Uber, Lyft and the other non-traditional taxi companies has always been that they disrupt the cosy cartel of the traditional taxi companies. This is obviously why Uber and Lyft are so to the benefit of actual passengers, their disruption of the cartel.
That cartel takes different forms in different places. In London it’s the insistence that black cab drivers take The Knowledge. Something that’s entirely redundant in today’s world of online mapping systems.…
See MoreIt’s possible for people to have a monomania and then fit everything into that world view, of course it is. There’s no explanation for Marxism other than that. But it’s rare to see such mistakes – other than that Marxism of course – being taken seriously.
Here’s one of those rare examples from The Observer:
On Friday Lyft, the ridesharing company, went public on the US stock markets, soaring 21% before ending the day up a more modest 8.7%.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that a significant rise in corporate value after an initial public offering is a failure of that IPO. Yes, that’s not normally how everyone thinks of it, certainly not the newspaper finance pages. Yet it is still so. If Lyft was sold at $21 billion – sure, not the whole company but – and a day later is worth $30 billion then that’s a failure. Because, obviously enough, the people selling stock were doing so in order to gain money for having done so.…
See MoreAs we’ve pointed out before people have a very strange series of beliefs about initial public offerings, this idea that the Lyft IPO is going to make some set of people rich. This simply isn’t so, they’re already rich, that’s why they’re having the IPO. They yesterday owned something that was of value, they today still own something which is of value. That’s how this capitalism and markets thing works.
Thus this is just silly as the basis of an article:
Here’s who will get rich from the Lyft IPO
Well, no one, actually.…
See MoreJust a little note here concerning the upcoming IPO of Lyft, the ride sharing company. CNBC is trying to tell us that certain people are going to get rich as a result of this IPO. This is not so – the people they’re talking about are already rich. They must be, otherwise how would an IPO gain them value?
Quite, they’e in the process of selling some part of something that’s valuable, that’s what an IPO is.…
See MoreUber has filed for an initial public offering – IPO – and is now in something of a race with Lyft to see who can be the first to tap those public markets. There are no publicly listed – US at least – ride sharing companies so these two are striving to be first. The earlier gets to set expectations for the second which is why there’s that race:
Uber Technologies Inc. filed paperwork confidentially this week for its initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter, as it races with smaller rival Lyft Inc.
We might want to say that the New York City people who run the Taxi And Limousine Commission are being more than a tad mad here. We might also say that they’re being delightfully machiavellian. For they’ve just brought in minimum wage rules which apply to drivers for hail by app rides. But these don’t apply to the more traditional taxi business in the same city. In one sense this is quite mad. In another it’s a typical piece of politics.…
See More