The Free Money Era

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Watching DoorDash and Airbnb go public this week, brought home how much markets have changed from the 90s.

Big deals are up 1,000-fold in 40 years.

I graduated university in early 1990s, and was born in the late 1960s => part of the first generation to come of age after the very inflationary 70s.

The mentors, and wise-old-men, of my early career had been heavily influenced by their experience with price-inflation. In turn, when those vets had been young stallions, they were influenced by survivors of the Great Depression.

I received a very conservative financial education.

The two “mountains” are annual inflation peaks of ~12% and ~15%. Mid-70s and 1980. I have early memories of “grown-ups” buying CDN government bonds at ~15% with all available cash resources. Note the recession frequency (shaded) from 1970 to 1982.

These days we’re told we don’t have enough inflation.

I’m not sure about that => the price to buy $1 of cash flow has skyrocketed.

I’ll post the last 40 years of price inflation below.

Forward to now – from the 1980 peak. I agree, not much price inflation there.

Watching Airbnb/DoorDash/Bitcoin/Tesla, and looking at luxury real estate, I see inflation at work, but differently.

Inflation is not necessarily a bad thing – there’s never been a better time to be world-class at solving problems for people. More on that later.

I see a tsunami of money.

The tsunami is caused by a long-term decline in the real cost of money => approximately the gap between the red and the blue line in the chart above. Compared to the 80s and 90s, we are living in an era of “free money”.

At market tops, it is easy to find people congratulating themselves for their vision. A favorite quote (from a very successful friend of the family) is “some see, others saw.”

Something I failed to see, when I was on the inside, was the benefit received from:

  • The global money tsunami
  • Constantly dropping long term rates (the current 30-year rate implies a PE ratio over 50x)
  • Increasing investor allocations to our sector

Add non-recourse leverage, ring fence the deals/funds and there was no way to lose.

Of course, we didn’t see it that way => we were smart, we worked hard and we were visionaries.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Tomorrow => what this era might mean for my kids, effectively, two generations behind me.

1 thought on “The Free Money Era”

  1. Pingback: The Declining Value of Ownership | Feel The Byrn

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