Who is Best at Picking "Winners and Losers"

[MTI]

In What Tortured Accounting Scheme Does 1.4% Equal 50%

Yet while there have been a handful of notable failures, such as Solyndra, not even close to half of the clean-energy loan recipients have failed–at the end of 2011 the failure rate was just 1.4 percent.

DOE picked more "winners" than Silicon Valley venture capitalist

[MS Fowler]

What % of the MONEY was wasted?
IOW, if you give $1000 to each of 1000 companies and they all succeed, and $100,000,000 to one and that one fails, %-wise you look pretty good, but money-wise you look pretty poor.

[anthonyb]

Originally Posted by MS Fowler

What % of the MONEY was wasted?
IOW, if you give $1000 to each of 1000 companies and they all succeed, and $100,000,000 to one and that one fails, %-wise you look pretty good, but money-wise you look pretty poor.

From the 2nd link:

The US government guarantee of a private loan to Solyndra, at $535 million, represented a minuscule 1.4% of the Department of Energy investment in all renewable technologies. By contrast – VCs (who were out $1 billion to Solyndra, for example) expect much higher failure rates. Richard Stuebi, who advises VCs on expected green energy failure rates, says that just 3 in 10 successes represents a successful VC investment strategy. That is 70% losers – not 1.4%.
Clean Technica (Obama DOE Picked More Energy Winners Than Silicon Valley VCs - CleanTechnica)
Read more at Obama DOE Picked More Energy Winners Than Silicon Valley VCs - CleanTechnica


I'm actually not sure about those numbers, $500 million is more like 0.5% of 90 billion, but they don't mention how they calculate their percentage.

It is interesting to note the difference in the rate between government and VC investments. I suppose government should run at a 0% failure rate.

[MTI]

Satire, To Be Successful, Has to Be Based In Reality

Clean Energy Whoppers

We were surprised by the claim that “about half” of the companies went out of business. As we have written before, an independent review of the Department of Energy loan and loan guarantee programs found that the failure rate was lower than Congress had expected.

When we asked the Romney campaign for information on this claim, we were told that it refers only to companies that received so-called section 1705 loans — a program created by the stimulus. A second program — the so-called section 1703 loan program — was created under the Bush administration, but loans were approved by the current administration. Also, Romney counted only section 1705 loan guarantees approved in the Obama administration’s first two years — ignoring the past two years.

[aklim]

Question. What is the side effect when a winner or loser is picked? Lets say they pick at 50%, is it good? I'd say. But when you consider the overall effect of the bill, is it? Every bill of theirs that is passed brings a lot of other crap into the mix, that is, unless anyone is dumb enough to believe that each and every bill is about 1 item only. Usually, pork is involved so is it a net positive effect?

[Botnst]

Golly, the gov didn't lose as much on solar boondoggle investment as some people predicted. Isn't the gov clever?