Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Could Facebook Save California?


Fascinating. I never thought of this. I'm sure home prices in nice parts of SF and the Peninsula will go crazy too. 
 

"To make things much more realistic and recent, in 2006 California received $11.3b in personal tax receipts, $4.3b more than the previous tax year. A main difference? One company: Google. The newly-public company's executives and rank & file employees cashed out stock & options at a furious rate, accounting for much of the increment.

At the time, Google's public market capitalization grew from $70b to $100b. The lower end is approximately the current secondary market capitalization of Facebook, the current IPO market object d'ardor. There are more California companies coming public, however, almost certainly including Zynga, Linkedin, et al., which would add materially to this total market capitalization of newly public companies seeing option exercises.

All else being equal, I'm guessing California will report a surprise spike in 2011 and 2012 personal tax receipts. It is over-leveraged to personal income, of course, and, within that, to stock  option exercises and capital gains. But those will all jump much higher in the coming 24 months, and seems to have escaped most analysts' scrutiny as they project California flat-lining into being the next Greece."