An insanely wealthy Twitter investor is venturing into fantasy land

US Outlook

It’s not every day that an insanely wealthy venture capitalist (translation: someone who has no idea how lucky they are) gets his knickers in a twist about an investment. Well maybe it is, but Chris Sacca isn’t an ordinary venture capitalist. Just 40 years old, he is known for his utterly naff, hand-embroidered cowboy shirts and was an early Google employee, which is where the money to be a venture capitalist came from.

He claims that he is not an “activist” investor, but that didn’t stop him from penning and publishing an 8,500-word screed on Twitter’s current struggles this week. If only the company would listen to him, his investment, which began before the company went public and from which he has already made many hundreds of millions, would be worth a lot more.

His Twitter stake is owned by his vehicle, “LOWERCASE capital”, a name that presumably was meant to be amusing but is about as funny as genital warts. His brother happens to be a well-known comedian, but the comic genes were not spread evenly. It also owns a stake in Uber and Snapchat, both of which seem to double in “value” every couple of months, so his struggle is real.

Mr Sacca doesn’t seem to be finding an awful lot of sympathy. No wonder. His thoughts on what Twitter’s management should do are shallow to the point of making the average Big Brother contestant sound like the Dalai Lama: “Make tweets effortless to enjoy”; “Make each of us on Twitter feel heard and valuable”; “Twitter feels lonely”.

The company’s problems are not going to be solved by vague drivel like “Twitter has failed to tell its own story”. Besides, only in the fantasy world that people like Mr Sacca inhabits can a company that made a loss of $577m in 2014 and has missed forecasts time after time, but is still somehow worth about $25bn, be considered to have failed.

Twitter’s has failings, for sure. Keeping up with it is a pain in the neck, unless you have literally nothing else to do with your time. Life is too short, and its weak user growth and retention perfectly illustrates that fact. It’s also home to legions of racist trolls – witness the repulsive reaction to Barack Obama’s recent arrival on Twitter as Potus. What sane person sees that and then wants to hang out there? Apart from the President, that is

The Twitter chief executive, Dick Costolo, was also noticeable by his absence from the entire 8,500 words. It is Mr Costolo’s habit of making promises he can’t keep that has resulted in Wall Street’s distrust of Twitter, and until he is shown the door, or the company starts to give guidance that it can actually meet, the stock is going to continue to lag behind its peers.

Without a hint of self-awareness, Mr Sacca told CNBC that Google buying Twitter would be a “fantastic” use of Google’s cash. It wouldn’t be, but it would be a fantastic bailout for Mr Sacca – and, boy, does he think he deserves one.

Twitter is far from dead, but Mr Sacca is demanding the impossible in the most trivial way – which probably seems like a perfectly rational demand when you live in a fantasy world.

IMF makes the right call on US rates – but will Yellen?

US growth rates for the first quarter of 2015 were revised lower at the start of last week, from an anemic 0.2 per cent growth to a 0.7 per cent decline, which can hardly have come as a surprise to anyone who lives here. Basically the entire country ground to a halt in February, everyone north of Arkansas stuck in a real-life version of Frozen.

The result of that revision should be that benchmark US rates will stay at virtually zero, where they have been since the financial crisis of 2008, for at least the rest of the year. Enthusiasm for a rise by summer has dried up and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is against raising US rates until mid-2016. The IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, told journalists that “the [US] economy would be better off with a rate hike in early 2016” – a gimme in light of uneven growth, global economic uncertainty and a widening US trade deficit.

The view is that, although the headline economy is much better than it has been, economic life for middle America remains a struggle. Wages are stagnant, good jobs are hard to come by and job security is non-existent. Headline inflation is also non-existent, the dollar remains too strong and gains have not exactly been shared anything like evenly. People are getting better at getting by with less. That fewer people are claiming unemployment benefits than at any time since November 2000, as confirmed by this week’s jobs report, is only for politicians to cheer.

Janet Yellen has provided the Federal Reserve with extremely cautious, focused leadership, which was just what it needed. Her predecessors, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, had baggage, delusions of grandeur and a fundamentally flawed understanding of risk. It is unlikely that the Fed or Ms Yellen will ignore good sense and start to raise rates any time soon.

The exceptional Americans just don't 'get' metric

One of the most baffling aspects of life in the US is the dogged resistance to the metric system. “Oh, you have the metric system in Europe. I don’t get that,” they say. “What, the one where water freezes at zero and boils at 100? That’s the one you don’t ‘get’?” I wouldn’t be much of an ambassador for Britain if I didn’t have a bit of a superiority complex. So congratulations to Lincoln Chafee, a former governor of Rhode Island, who threw his hat into the 2016 Democratic primary race on Wednesday. He wants Americans to ditch imperial and get with the metric programme.

Converting to metric would be “good for our economy and our bottom line”, he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He is absolutely correct, although sadly he might as well have told Mr Blitzer he is a card-carrying communist for all the good it will do him. Americans love feet, inches, pounds and miles. It’s all part of US “exceptionalism”, and no amount of benefit to the bottom line is going to change that. A strange juxtaposition, but a very real one. No wonder Mr Chafee is currently polling at 0 per cent.