Sports Illustrated layoffs

I posted this on here during the summer.

Yes, I know Kevin Rendino and Bryant Riley. I don't know what exactly they think they are doing with this clown show. In the case of B. Riley, it kind of looks like they put themselves down a rabbit hole. They got really deep into bad loans to these guys and rather than cutting their losses after I posted the thing above where I said the company will keep trying to borrow until they can't. And B. Riley was there with more money to feed the sinkhole.

I get the sense that people on here think VC money is magical, or that the men making these loans and equity investments know something that the rest of us don't. They don't. Venture capital has historically grossly underperformed a lot of other kinds of investment. It's often not the smartest money. But people have gotten a skewed take over the last couple of decades by some VC money that got very rich on what have been speculative bubbles, because of what the Fed and other central banks around the world did to destroy our debt markets (and keep interest rates low and debt levels rising). They rob savers and investors of the yield a free market would reward them with. ... and the net effect is that it pushes that money into riskier (and dumber) things. After years and years of that (and it requiring more and more intervention from the Fed), and interest rates paying nothing to savers, it hsa created speculative bubbles all around us -- it has been that way for the last decade. Just because some people have gotten lucky in that environment doesn't mean they are smart. It was more right place, right time with some price czars creating an insane environment in which companies with no earnings and questionable businesses get bid up to companies worth millions and billions of dollars.

A lot of cheap money (you can borrow for nothing) mixed with a lot of greed and stupidity has made it so that con men, charlatans, dumb-idea businesses, etc. have been able to attract insane amounts of investment and lending. And for every investor who cashes out at the right time, you are eventually looking at a way more investors who lose a lot of money -- with the economic problems that come with trillions of dollars of unproductive debt.

We are still in that environment, unfortunately. This is a debt bubble -- a mountain of debt that built up mostly since the financial crisis in 2007/08 thanks to the Fed -- and they won't let it pop before they try to keep it propped up with more and more debt. This is what the Fed is doing. But even with them pinning interest rates at zero (robbing savers to feed the debt machine) and buying up billions upon billions of debt with freshly created money out of thin air every month right now to try to prevent failure -- so that mney is cheaper than ever -- the pandemic has been a bit like the tide going out and everyone seeing some of the naked swimmers.

The fact that theMaven is still able to borrow (another $24 million within the last 2 weeks), when it is a failed business that shouldn't have existed anywhere near this long, is the problem. We allowed the Fed to create a survival of the unfittest environment, and the reason that VC firms and lenders are giving money to what look like dumb things, is because those are the incentives they are given -- without more debt feeding all the bad debt that has already been created, the madness ends. Of course, by keeping it going, we make the bad debt pile bigger and bigger and the eventual payback worse. The investors that get sucked in do it because they feel there is no alternative (they actually call it "TINA"). Our debt markets aren't free and a central planning authority (the Fed) is controlling it like we are Soviet-style command economy. So why fight them? Over the last decade, you have continually gotten bailed out with schemes to keep your debt from going bad or outright cash bailouts (socializing the cost and putting an anchor on the broader economy). That has been their experience.