A Glut of Easy Money Is Clogging City Streets
When interest rates are this low, even money losers like Lyft get funding.
Dense cities are the world’s traditional marketplaces, where people come together to trade goods and services in pursuit of profit. But what happens when the world’s markets are warped? This year’s marquee initial public offering—the app-based car-hailing service Lyft, set to debut Friday on the Nasdaq exchange—isn’t so much a gauge of functional, robust markets, but a marker of the challenge that global cities face amid the whims of central bankers and venture capitalists.
A decade of record-low interest rates has made a fun-house mirror out of investment markets. In a normal world, with tighter credit, investors would not pour billions of dollars into companies that are likely to lose money
