timelets

Vance left Revolution in 2019. Shortly after, he started Narya with Greenspon. The pair raised $120 million in their first fund with backing from Thiel as well as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to a person familiar with the fund’s financials. That fund generated a multiple on invested capital of 1.67 and an internal rate of return of 24.35% after fees as of March 2023, according to an investor document.

Since its founding, Narya has made 14 investments, one of which is in stealth, the person said. They include Rumble, a video platform popular with the political right which went public through a special-purpose acquisition company, better known as a SPAC, while Vance was running for the Senate seat, and Hallow, a Catholic meditation and prayer app. Three others have ties to Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who once vied for the Republican presidential nomination and was a law school classmate of Vance’s.

Vance invested again in AppHarvest through Narya and joined the board in July 2020, according to the company’s securities filings. Other board members included Martha Stewart and investor Jeffrey Ubben. In February 2021, the company went public through a SPAC. Vance resigned from the board two months later to make his run for the Senate.

Months after Vance left the board, AppHarvest was sued by individual investors and a county retirement association in five separate lawsuits. These suits alleged that the company had misled regulators and investors and failed to disclose adverse facts about its operations, including a “lack of employee training and an inability to hire and retain employees due to attrition.” The company filed for bankruptcy in mid-2023.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/vp-pick-jd-vance-short-career-venture-capitalist-b3d941e1

The enormous amounts of money in no- and low-returning investments won’t be nearly enough to fund the liabilities, even though the pile looks like a lot. That is because they don’t provide adequate income. In fact, most of them won’t provide any income, so they are worthless for that purpose. They just provide a “safe” place to store principal. As a result, to finance their expenditures, owners of them will have to sell off principal, which will diminish the amount of principal that they have left, so that they a) will need progressively higher and higher returns on the dwindling amounts (which they have no prospect of getting) or b) they will have to accelerate their eating away at principal until the money runs out.

That will happen at the same time that there will be greater internal conflicts (mostly between socialists and capitalists) about how to divide the pie and greater external conflicts (mostly between countries about how to divide both the global economic pie and global influence). In such a world, storing one’s money in cash and bonds will no longer be safe.