LyrArc Article Gist
The mysterious activities and losses of a South Korean/Japanese venture capital company Softbank which has been part of the massive misallocation of capital away from infrastructure and health care services during the decades before the pandemic. It has emerged recently as the mystery investor in options on tech shares that led to shares losses of 7 billion pounds for Softbank.

It lost half of its value in an earlier dotcom crash. A few investments in China during the early period of its development based on gut feel of the founder, including Alibaba an e-commerce company based on Amazon's success in the U.S. and other investments in China, is the basis of its business model. This model puts huge amounts of U.S. and foreign capital with estimated pool of capital at $100 billion into ventures that set the wrong priorities for investment- leading to misallocation of capital at this time of the pandemic. 

LyrArc Article Gist
Softbank suffers a loss of $6.5 billion after placing bad bets on WeWork startup. Is there massive capital misallocation in capital markets as they are operating now, with waste and misallocation leading to depriving other productive investments for society's benefit being funded. 

During this period of misallocation in the way capital markets are functioning in allocating scarce capital, infrastructure investments in the U.S. and Europe have been badly neglected. The U.S. and Europe now lag behind China in 5G making this an issue with implications for society, and for protecting the public interest.

LyrArc Article Gist
This WSJ report looks at another example of the misallocation of capital of billions of dollars at a time when infrastructure, essential services, health and education are being starved of capital. In this example inflation of balance sheets at Wirecard before its bankruptcy enabled it to raise 3.7 billion dollars in the debt in the years before its collapse, with nearly half of this coming from Softbank an investment firm of people's money. Money that is now completely lost.