Jim Grant on the everything bubble's malinvestments

I think the way to imagine this is to put ourselves in mind of the old college freshman fraternity initiation trick, and that is yanking a tablecloth out from under a set table of china, glassware and porcelain.  Now, if you go on WikiHow to investigate how to do this, WikiHow will advise, "Always try it with plastic cutlery and cups."  But notice the Fed has not got that option because the table is set proverbially and metaphorically... with the most brittle glassware and the most precious porcelain and bull market champagne flutes because of 12 years of suppressed interest rates which have fostered risk taking, which have brought forth into the world all these companies called unicorns because they come to market with a billion dollars and generate not much earnings.  So the world is full of uneconomic economic projects, fostered through financial stimulus, principally low interest rates, right?

So, what happens when you raise the rate of interest on companies that need to borrow just to stay alive?  Well, they can't stay alive, so they're cascading failures.  And companies supply those uneconomic things.  Think of craft beer makers that sold beer to WeWork in the day, right?  So there's a whole chain of economic activity that goes to support uneconomic activity.

So that's the metaphor for the yanking the tablecloth.

~ Jim Grant, interview with William Green, 58:15 mark, August 20, 2022

Scott Galloway on the cult of personality at WeWork

WeWork's prospectus has a dedication (no joke): "We dedicate this to the power of We — greater than any one of us, but inside each of us." Pretty sure Jim Jones had t-shirts printed up with this inspiring missive. Speaking of idolatry, "Adam" (as in Neumann) is mentioned 169 times, vs. an average of 25 mentions for founder/CEOs in other unicorn prospectuses. Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, is mentioned 29 times in their prospectus. Granted, "Adam" is super dreamy, in sort of an Argentinian polo player way (he's Israeli). But he's not 6x dreamier than Dara, who has a whole “Omar Sharif, if he went to Brown” thing going on. But I digress. We's mission is "to elevate the world's consciousness." Maybe, but it's clear the mission of the prospectus is to dampen our consciousness ahead of the sh*tshow that is "The Story of Us: We."

~ Scott Galloway, "WeWTF," No Mercy / No Malice blog, August 16, 2019