Has Facebook Peaked?

Gonzalo Lira


If Hollywood has gone and made a movie about Facebook, then Facebook has probably peaked.  

  

“One of us, one of us, one of us . . .”

Looking at the numbers, it would seem that FB has definitely peaked: On July 22 of 2010, it got its 500 millionth user—but now three months later, it’s at 543 million. 

  

The inference is easy to make: From the halcyon days of consistently charting 25 million new users per month, Facebook is now going up by about 14 million new users per month. 

  

Still: 14 million users a month? The implications are staggering. 

  

FB doesn’t release numbers of users who’ve quit—rather cagily, they say that, on any given day, half of all users log on to Facebook. 

  

But none of that really matters: Who has registered, and now is inactive, who registered and is on every day, who registered and is sporadic, who registered and now wants their Facebook account shut down and disappeared—all of that is trivial and unimportant, compared to the central and obvious fact that they all registered on Facebook.  

  

This means? It means that one corporation has managed to get the basic personal information of roughly ten percent of the world. 

  

That’s epochal. No wonder the fuckers in Hollywood made a movie about the people behind the Facebook program. So let’s not get too cavalier and condescending, when discussing this remarkable achievement. 

  

Regardless of what happens, unless a meteor comes out of the sky and blows away the computer servers holding all that information, the implications of the Facebook program are going to be with us for decades to come. Yes, decades. 

  

Facebook is a big deal. 

  

Now, there are myriad issues regarding the Facebook program—my concerns are two-fold: The marketing possibilities, and the corporatist issues. Both concerns sort of meld into one another in my head, so I won’t try making a hard-and-fast distinction between the two as I write. 

  

Facebook is a marketer’s wet dream: It is the largest market survey ever carried out—and the beauty of it is, the Facebook program quantifies all the market preferences of its users, making them easy targets for market campaigns. 

  

A lot of people are concerned about privacy rights, vis-à-vis the Facebook program—they should be, but the battle is lost: Facebook users are the traitors in this war. They themselves signed away their privacy, when they gave out their information to Facebook. 

  

What, the Facebook corporation isn’t going to make use of all this data it’s collected? Dream on, fool—and if you’re still dreamin’, then I got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell ya. 

  

Of course the Facebook corporation is going to use all the data it’s collected: There is really no other use for all this data. The Facebook program is the world’s largest personal database. The world’s largest corporate database. The Facebook corporation will sell this data to other corporations—I’m frankly assuming it already is doing so. 

  

Therefore, as the Facebook corporation interacts more and more with other corporations looking for the sweet data the Facebook program has collected, the Facebook corporation could easily become the lynchpin of most marketing campaigns. It would eclipse Google, because although Google is everywhere, it doesn’t have the targeted data that the Facebook program has collected. 

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Signs Hyperinflation Is Arriving

Gonzalo Lira

This post is gonna be short and sweet—and scary: 
  
Back in late August, I argued that hyperinflation would be triggered by a run on Treasury bonds. I described how such a run might happen, and argued that if Treasuries were no longer considered safe, then commodities would become the store of value. 

  

See, how come I don’t look as cool
when I make my predictions?

Such a run on commodities, I further argued, would inevitably lead to price increases and a rise in the Consumer Price Index, which would initially be interpreted by the Federal Reserve, the Federal government, as well as the commentariat, as a good thing: A sign that “the economy is recovering”, a sign that “normalcy” was returning. 

  

I argued that—far from being “a sign of recovery”—rising CPI would be the sign that things were about to get ugly. 

  

I concluded that, like the stagflation of ‘79, inflation would rise to the double digits relatively quickly. However, unlike in 1980, when Paul Volcker raised interest rates severely in order to halt inflation, in today’s weakened macro-economic environment, that remedy is simply not available to Ben Bernanke. 
  
Therefore, I predicted that inflation would spiral out of control, and turn into hyperinflation of the U.S. dollar. 
  
A lot of people claimed I was on drugs when I wrote this. 
  
Now? Not so much. 

  

In my initial argument, I was sure that there would come a moment when Treasury bond holders would realize that they are the New & Improved Toxic Asset—as everyone knows, there is no way the U.S. Federal government can pay the outstanding debt it has: It’s simply too big. 
  
So I assumed that, when the market collectively realized this, there would be a panic in Treasuries. This panic, of course, would lead to the spike in commodities. 

  

However, I am no longer certain if there will ever be such a panic in Treasuries. Backstop Benny has been so adroit at propping up Treasuries and keeping their yields low, the Stealth Monetization has been so effective, the TBTF banks’ arbitrage trade between the Fed’s liquidity windows and Treasury bond yields has been so lucrative, and the bond market itself is so aware that Bernanke will do anything to protect and backstop Treasuries, that I no longer think that there will necessarily be such a panic. 

  

But that doesn’t mean that the second part of my thesis—commodities rising, which will trigger inflation, which will devolve into hyperinflation—will not occur. 

  

In fact, it is occurring. 

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