Thread by @Pinboard

Specifically, there's 71% left to go.

https://twitter.com/CNBCTechCheck/status/1395785121861718021

A quarter of WeWork's loss came from paying Adam Neumann half a BILLION dollars to stay away from the place for a year. They also paid him $50 million on top of that to not work anywhere else. That's puzzling. You'd think they'd want the guy hired sequentially by every competitor

No word on the fate of WeLive, the subsidiary that will rent you this magnificent New York apartment for $4,178 a month

WeWork will be paying Adam Neumann about $57,000 an hour to stay away from its board for a year. I can save them millions by staying away from their board for a much lower rate, for as long as they want. Call me.

Capitalism requires a feedback mechanism that punishes people for throwing gargantuan sums of money on a transparently foolish idea. But when the asset bubble is so big that investor money has outlet, you get phenomena like WeWork. No one involved will be deterred from anything

The main crisis in capital today is where to put it all. The simplistic answer (just distribute some of the glut to everyone) seems to be working a lot better than traditional forms of investment. But why capital is so constipated that it can't connect to production mystifies me

Unlike many people, I see capitalism more of a glorified lifehack than a worldview. You reward individual greed when the greedy person makes stuff a lot of people want or need, and it works. But today that profit motive is aligned with extracting investment, not making stuff

Why this constipated capital just sloshes around, with investors increasingly desperate to allocate it, while the physical world around us stagnates and wages are low, remains a mystery to me. America used to be good at this kind of thing!

I wish I had a @matthewstoller-like Big Theory about this glut (everything is monopoly!), but I don't. What changed after 2008 to kill innovation and real investment dead?

Look at all this sweet moolah. Why can't it get down to building factories and trains and spaceports and so on?

I feel like I increasingly don't understand anything that happened after the 2008 financial crisis