Ed Driscoll

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#Greenfail Part Deux: Obama Makes for a Terrible VC

January 27, 2012 - 3:43 pm - by Ed Driscoll

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Ah, the joys of venture socialism. “Barack Obama is a Terrible Fund Manager, and a Rotten Tech VC,” Rob Long writes at Ricochet:

First, he lost $500 million on a failed, foolish, and almost corrupt investment in Solyndra, the high-flying and high-overhead solar panel maker, run by some of his financial backers.  Talk about crony capitalism.

Now, he’s lost another $100 million on something called Ener1.  From Heritage’s excellent blog, The Foundry, a post by Lachlan Markay — and if you’re not bookmarking him, you should be:

After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.

But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired.

Read the whole thing. As Rob writes, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

I’m not sure if the president wouldn’t view that as a feature. We know at least one of his most prominent early supporters does.

Filed under: Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, Liberal Fascism, The Assault On Reason, The Future and its Enemies, The Making of the President

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1 Comments, 1 Threads

  1. 1. Andrew_M_Garland

    Team Obama thinks that “money moving around” is what causes prosperity, instead of being a side effect of the distribution of goods in a period of prosperity. Worse, Team Obama believes in the economics of Keynes that government spending is actually multiplied by 1.5 or more in its good effect.

    So, Obama and his utopian economists think that “investing” by the government is essentially free. Even if the project fails, the spending supposedly creates wealth by increasing “demand”.

    Government spending doesn’t multiply anything. Government takes resources from taxpayers and applies them to government projects. We get a bridge or some paperwork; that is it. Or, we get $118 million worth of planning, plant, and equipment whose single purpose is to make batteries which no one wants.

    The Myth of the Economic Multiplier

    January 27, 2012 - 8:48 pm   Link to this Comment