Lots of winning bets in venture investing are “obvious failures” - except when they’re not.
Eh, sad that what looks to me like your typical venture financing bet (one expects, according to the literature on this, to see a 50%+ failure rate).
Equally queer, every history I read on how entrepreneur financing emerged in North America and UK emphasizes the role of the Government in helping kick-start it. It’s ahistrical to say Gov has no place in venture financing - historically it has been key to helping private money on the margins.
However, seems back USA side ideology is more important than fact.
Bricker, I too appreciate your efforts to be fair here. It isn’t going unnoticed.
I’m waiting for more information on this, but I don’t like how it is starting to look. I am going to be more than disappointed if the president is dirty in this.
Not seeing that it was “obvious” except by looking in the rear view mirror today, and certainly not seeing what “pressure” was exerted. I’m guessing that’s why you just gave us a link with no quotes. More persuasive would be an analysis from 2 years ago telling us it was a bad investment. Anyone can come along after the fact and tell us how prescient they WOULD have been.
Obama did not manage the company. He also did not manage the auto companies who are doing quite well. They are profitable and hiring workers.
Solyndra will get a hundred congressional investigations by the Repubs. Fox and talk radio will pound it to death.
Most people will wonder what the hell they are yelling about, but they will connect Obama to something that is repeatedly being broadcast as evil. I do not know how much traction it will get, but it wont be because the rightys didn’t try.
Reading over this overview of the company and the investors involved from I guess the ‘home town’ newspaper - the LA Times, it rather seems evident that contra the blind partisans, this was an interesting bet. And like any new technology, it had a chance of failure. That is fairly the point of such efforts, so ranting afterwards is merely a sad display of nasty partisanship. Pity, as it would be good for the global economy if USA land got on its feet through innovative new tech.
I would say only Bricker here has shown even-handed and business-minded analysis.
Solyndra’s revenue in the nine months ending Oct 3 was $58.814 million and their cost of goods sold for the same period was $108.321 million for the total of 17.2 Megawatts of CIGS solar panels shipped in that period. Almost half of that revenue (49 per cent) came from three customers - USE Umwelt Sonne Energie, Carlisle Syntec and Alwitra.
That works out to:
* A sale price of $3.42 per Watt
* A cost of $6.29 per Watt
…Solyndra must also compete head-on with the plunging price of flat plate panels from BP Solar, Suntech, Mitsubishi, etc. while lowering their cost almost an order of magnitude from about $6 per Watt to under $1 per Watt.
Your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss calls and asks how his pet project is coming and if it will be ready in time for use in a political speech. No pressure at all for a loan process that has dragged on for over 3 years. Profit be dammed. It’s the President’s personal pet project and he’s got deep pockets (ours).
I guess if you squint at the numbers really hard and hope that all of Solyndra’s competitors go of business and China is hit by a comet then it makes sense.
The President used other people’s money to bet $500,000 per worker. The function of government is not to gamble money in the stock market. That goes doubly so during high unemployment. $500 million dollars would have filled a lot of pot holes or repaired bridges. It could not be any clearer than that during a recession.
Put another way, that tax money could have been used to pay 10,000 workers $50,000 to produce tangible and lasting public utility for a year.
As I understand it, your President neither created this investment guarantee program (as I understand it was actually up for consideration under the prior Presidency) nor personally made an investment decision.
So one can hardly, if one is not a rabid irrational partisan, say that your President used anyone’s money at a..
Of course the American government did no such thing, since this was not a public company.
That bit of fundamental fact aside, I understand you have a blanket ideological objection to the very existence of such programs.
Rather a different proposition, really.
I seem to recall you have a rather blanket objection to government stimulus, etc. so I shall have to take this as a ‘for form’ rejoinder, and doubtless if the President who Happens to Be of the Wrong Party had spent the money on pot holes, etc, the criticism would conveniently flip around.
There is no evidence Obama made any phone calls regarding this. And there is no evidence that anyone pressured anyone. You can look for all sorts of “implied pressure”, but then you have to accept that every time an administration official makes a call, it ends up creating pressure for something to be done, and the only way to prevent that is to never make any calls. That is absurd.
No it isn’t a different proposition. It was money spent on a bet versus money used to purchase public utility. All of it is gone. We’re now on the hook for another 1000 unemployed people. We could easily have paid them to work for 10 more years for the money spent. It’s not a blanket ideology, it’s basic economics. It was real money and it’s gone. We needed that money.
No, I’ve never objected to government stimulus. It’s been used successfully as a short term tool to stimulate short term spending. Financial downturns are not a one-size-fits-all but that is besides the point of spending money poorly. If a bank makes a bad decision they’re evil money sucking bastards but if politicians do it it’s business as usual. $500 million dollars was just gambled away never to be seen again. It was not stimulus money, it was gambling money and it’s gone.
We had a Republican Governor in my state who invested state money in rare coins. What a stupid idiotic thing to do. We voted him out of office. We can’t afford to gamble tax money. We’re paying politicians $150,000 or more a year to spend our money and the only job qualification is white teeth and a speech that was purchased from focus group research.
“The buck stops here” sign has moved from desk to desk and now sits over the doorway of the Federal Reserve printing presses. There is no accountability from people who are making speeches about business accountability.
We have a politically divided country that is run by people of both parties who can’t balance a budget. They buy our loyalty with our own money and vote themselves raises based on the ability to overspend. Pretty nice gig if you can get it.
This is only Obama fodder because he used this company for his own political gain. It’s really a congressional issue because they create the budget and are entrusted with the accountability that goes with it.
There are plenty of companies that lose money, and yet can be a good long term investment.
I said in my very first post in this thread that this will be bad, politically, for Obama because he singled Solyndra out as the wave of the future. That doesn’t mean the Obama administration mishandled the process of granting the loan guarantee.
"Two months**before **Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
"The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors. That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company’s travails culminated in its filing for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later. "
whether the company was publicly traded or invested in privately makes zero difference regarding my point about the government gambling tax money in the marketplace. It’s still invested money that carries great risk. it’s a desperate hair splitting debate tactic with no point.
Any startup is always on the brink of failure. Ones with solid product ideas in growth markets that get capital infusions at the critical moments are the ones that go on to create jobs. Job creation is pretty important to you, right? Unless it’s Democrats that help do it, is that it?
It’s not a scandal, it’s one of Obama’s pet projects that went down in flames. He rode in on a horse of hope and change and his idealism went nowhere. We’re exactly where we were 3 years ago with no hope of change.
And concerning photovoltaics we are way ahead of where we were three years ago. One specific company from one specific government program doesnot a failure for an industry make. Yeah, Obama tied his horse to the wrong trailer apparently, so what. Do you think Obama was personally looking over their books? He saw the tech, maybe got a bit infatuated with it, relied on the DOE to do some due diligence and then got behind it. What is missing is any proof that the Administration pushed through or fast tracked the project against the best wishes of the DOE. They showed greater than usual interst in it, sure, big deal. I think it is a testament to the Obama administration that this is the worst scandal they got.