Making money: what the experts think
Flying bet
“No private company has ever burned cash at quite the clip that the world’s favourite ridehailing app does,” said Owen Davis on Dealbreaker.com. At the end of 2016, Uber was “churning through $1bn a quarter”, with no sign of profitability. Investors have recently “gotten wise” – Uber’s private valuation has reportedly fallen by some 15% in recent months. But the company isn’t about to give up. This week it announced that, by 2020, “it would reach the next frontier in dispensing with investor capital”: it will start testing “flying cars” in Dallas and Dubai. The project is certainly a useful distraction from Uber’s “snowballing” management crisis. “But with just $7bn in cash on hand, and $2.3bn in lines of credit”, CEO Travis Kalanick “may need to get those cars in the air a tad faster if he wants to keep his losses growing at their current, impressive clip”. Either that, or bite the bullet and go for an IPO.
Record mortgage low
The Yorkshire Building Society has just made headlines by launching Britain’s lowest-ever mortgage rate: an “eyecatching” two-year discounted product, “priced at a rockbottom 0.89%”, says James Moore in The Independent. The deal defies “recent predictions that the era of ultra-cheap mortgages could be coming to an end” – though it is only available to those with a “thumping” 35% deposit. And since the mortgage is a “variable” tracker, the interest you pay could jump if base rates rise. “Don’t get me wrong, it is still a good deal.” But, as Moneyfacts points out, it won’t help those at the sharp end of the market, and leaves “first-time buyers falling by the wayside” yet again.
Headline deals
According to Mark Harris of mortgage broker SPF Private Clients, “we could see even more competitive deals” if “the election means people put decisions to buy on hold” – prompting lenders to pull out the stops to tempt them in. But “headline deals” often “disappear almost as quickly as they arrive”, said Carol Lewis in The Times. Last week, Atom Bank withdrew a super-low 1.29% deal on a five-year fix, after just nine days. If you want to take advantage of the current rash of recordbreaking deals, move fast.