Investors are willing to gamble less and less on Groupon's imaginary future profits, various fund managers told Bloomberg, thanks to the near constant reminders about just how imaginary those profits are. One fund manager thinks the online coupon startup has seen its value fall to as low as $3 billion from $25 billion.

IPO fund manager Josef Schuster think Groupon may have to lower its valuation to $3-$5 billion to have a successful IPO. Bloomberg quoted him and two other fund managers who raised questions about the pricing of Groupon's public offering in the wake of its various public struggles, like the lawsuits, the loss of its COO and its sales chief, the SEC inquiries and the whole being kinda insolvent thing. Groupon obviously should have taken Google's $6 billion last fall. After all, if anyone knows this is a deflationary economy in which discounting is endemic and prices are constantly falling, it's Groupon, a company whose entire value proposition is that discounting is endemic and prices are constantly falling.

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