In the fullness of time, we may look at the sale of the NBA franchise, the Boston Celtics, as the bell that rang at the peak of the financialized economy. The team sold for a record-breaking $6.1 billion to a group led by billionaire William Chisholm, the managing partner of Symphony Technology Group. That firm has nothing to do with music or technology. It is a private equity firm. The deal still must be approved by the league and must go through the usual legal process.
The team is one of the crown jewels of the league, so it makes some sense that it commands the highest value. Since the beginning of the NBA, the Boston Celtics have been something like the New York Yankees—winning numerous titles and featuring some of the game’s greatest players. Wyc Grousbeck, whose family leads the ownership group that bought the team in 2002 for $360 million, made, on average, thirteen percent per year on his investment in the franchise.
By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about six percent a year on average, accounting for several crashes along the way. Median home prices in the United States have increased at about the same rate over that time. Some areas, like the Washington, D.C. area, have seen even larger jumps. Given that official inflation numbers are roughly half that figure, it shows that assets, even common ones like houses and equities, have experienced a steady increase.
Now, a golden rule of life is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it, but value is supposed to be linked to reality. The value of a business, for example, is tied to the value of its assets, its cash flow, and future profitability. A buyer expects to recoup his investment over a specific period, which means the business either has profits or assets that can be sold for a profit. The Boston Celtics are a business, so does that mean the business is worth $6 billion?
The answer is no, not in the conventional sense. Most sports franchises are break-even businesses, with many losing money. They often have negative cash flow due to player salaries, which means they carry a lot of debt. The NBA is experiencing a sharp downturn in its popularity, with television ratings down 60% from the peak. The Celtics do not own their arena, so they lack that asset to supplement their business. Most likely, the franchise is a money-loser by conventional standards.
Of course, the new owners do not care about the business side. They are billionaires who want to be in the billionaire club. It is as much about status as it is about business, but the business side still matters. They no doubt look at the massive inflation in franchise values and think they will have no trouble flipping this property for a nice profit once they get bored with it. In other words, they assume the asset inflation we have seen since the 1980s will continue.
This makes sense in the context of the current American economic model, the one Donald Trump is determined to replace with a new model. The economy that emerged in the 1980s is based on unlimited, cheap credit money that gets plowed into assets like equities, startups, and frivolous things like modern art and sports franchises. William Chisholm is a billionaire, despite never having invented or built anything, because he is highly skilled in the legerdemain of modern finance.
Another aspect of the new economy explains why certain assets, like sports franchises and some tech sectors, have outperformed houses and stocks. The NBA is financed, in large part, by taxes it levies on every household. These taxes come in the form of cable and television bills. If you have a television service, you are paying for all those games you don’t watch. Channels like ESPN are bundled into the bill, and they are a significant part of it. That money subsidizes the NBA.
If, tomorrow, everyone could simply pay for what they watch, like software as a service, sports channels like ESPN would go bankrupt within a month. Right behind them would be all the sports leagues. The reason? Sports networks would lose about 80% of their revenue. That means ESPN could not spend billions on live sports content, and without that revenue, the leagues would collapse. That $6 billion sale of the Celtics would look like the worst bet in history.
The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. The NBA is one example where the quality of the product has been disconnected from its financial success. In a true market economy, the owners of the Celtics would struggle to give it away, because the NBA, as an entertainment product, is in steep decline.
If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.
The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.
That is why the sale of the Celtics may be the bell ringing at the peak of the massive asset bubble that is the American economy. The absurdity of it should offend even the most zealous believer in the transactional economy. In a country with serious problems that require elite investment, watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus brings revolutionary thoughts to mind. It may be the last grotesque gesture of an economic model that has run its course.
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“If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.” Beautifully put. And if you look beyond the imported goods, at services that have to be supplied by the local labor force,… Read more »
the great lie of “free trade ” is that it supplies cheaper goods. That rests on the assumption that the companies selling the goods will pass the lower costs of Chinese goods on to the consumer. This is not the case. when converse shoes were mad in america they were $29.99 a pair. now that they are made in china, they are they are $60.00. Chuck Taylor All Star EVA Lift Canvas Platform. Which is why tariffs are nowhere near as inflationary as our media is predicting.
“This is not the case. when converse shoes were mad in america they were $29.99 a pair. now that they are made in china, they are they are $60.00.”
That’s difficult to believe. Are you saying there is not one joooo or globalist who saw the opportunity to make $30 a pair and didn’t say, “No, hard pass.”
That’s the lie of tariffs. They do not pass the extra 30 they make with the consumer
No, I mean if there were just one mathematically competent person in the US, wouldn’t he have created a company that produced shoes that capitalized on that $30 spread? If you are correct, heck, I should look into it.
Can’t believe my guy has me chasing opportunities of 50% when there’s 100+% in the offing. I’ll fire his ass tomorrow morning.
If I were wrong the store would be filled with bargians and the last 10 years whel everything went to china would have been deflationary. we would all be marveling at how cheap things were getting.
Those last two sentences are WORD. The fed printing $$$ out of thin air the past twenty years in particular have led us to this point – DOW 45,000, the Celtics being “worth” 6 billion and supposedly self-made billionaires no one has ever heard of…
These billionaires have all been created by asset-price inflation made possible by endless credit creation that impoverishes the rest of us in real terms.
Z: “In a country with serious problems that require elite investment, watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus brings revolutionary thoughts to mind. It may be the last grotesque gesture of an economic model that has run its course.“ The Celtics were a j00ish franchise going back almost forever. [cf (((Red Auerbach)))]. The fact that the j00z were willing to walk away from the franchise [and dump it in the laps of the idiot goyim] would tend to indicate that the j00z don’t see much money to be made in Diversity Inclusion Equity anymore. A stunning example… Read more »
I have wondered why the Deep State allowed Trump to return to office. Your explanation is a good one.
I never thought the Hamas attack on Oct-7-2023 was such a big deal. I just assumed that Israel was using it as an excuse to kill more Arabs and to steal more land.
However, if you’re right, it means the J00z really were freaked out about it – enough to call a truce to their war against the White Race. So that’s good news for Whites – I guess.
If the big jews (or enough of them) have decided they are on Team Whitey, then how long before they are on Team Mass Deportations? If they got behind that, then it could really happen. It doesn’t seem to me any more far fetched than their getting on Team Trump would have seemed 8 years ago. They are already down with deporting anyone who says anything nice about palestinians/negative about jews.
I would be shocked to ever see any such revolution. Getting rid of the vocal anti-Zionists is one thing, getting rid of the Third World masses they have so long worked to stock the country with would be quite another.
I suspect the bigger issue was that all those videos of mutilated children were threatening the programming of the goodwhites in the West so planting Zion Don to put the boot on the libs’ necks was the most logical path to retaining control and maintaining the supply of goyish childflesh to bake into matzah.
“I never thought the Hamas attack on Oct-7-2023 was such a big deal. I just assumed that Israel was using it as an excuse to kill more Arabs and to steal more land.” I don’t think the attack itself was such a big deal in their eyes. I would be surprised if the Israeli government did NOT know it was coming and I think it likely that they deliberately let it happen (dead childless raving druggies serve their people more in death than they ever did in life), so that they had Casus Belli they could wave around to justify… Read more »
That’s what I see Horace. It wasn’t the attack that rattled them, it was the “left’s” reaction to it that did. The people they thought were their allies. This is one of the things that social media permits: a quicker assessment of the zeitgeist (rightly or wrongly) than was available in the before times
they green flaged it to kick off the greater israel project
The NBA was always a Jewish enterprise, and basketball remains highly popular with Jews. The movie “Uncut Gems”, which is the most overtly Jewish movie in recent memory (after “A Serious Man”), is largely about the intersection of American Jews and basketball.
I didn’t think of the ethnic makeup of the Celtics buyer, but in response I will say that the Mavericks were sold, last year, from one Jew to another.
AA-
If people understood how private equity operated there would be immediate revolution.
Private equity literally wishes money into existence through their over-inflated valuations on assets.
Mitt Romney and Bain are an excellent case study for those interested.
The template is probably Ivan Boesky (on whom the fictitious Gordon Gekko is based). If we look at other decaying empires in the modern period — Dutch, British — they go through a period of parasite financialisation before finally flickering out. Finance is the empty and lifeless husk of what once a living social and economic organism.
Reminds me of Wells’s novel Tono Bungay
Reminds me of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, a novel that satirized the financial piracy rampant in 1870s England. Trollope wrote, concerning the book: Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all… Read more »
That’s a great novel, and the four-part TV adaptation is also well worth watching. Melmotte, incidentally, belongs to the tribe. Trollope desrcribes how the City of London — increasingly dominated by the tribe — was encroaching onto the preserve of landed gentry and aristocracy.
And a few decades later came the Marconi Scandal. Which guys like Rufus Isaacs (yup) simply sailed through… certainly didn’t hurt his subsequent career.
The rise of the US is best described as parasitic financialisation.
AA-
This is completely pedantic, but I had always thought that Gekko was based on corporate raider Michael Miliken, or a composite of Miliken, Boesky, and Carl Icahn. Probably not important in the grand scheme of things.
You’re quite right. Sorry for the belated response.
Imagine trying to explain to kids today the power of that beach at daybreak scene with the Motorola DynaTAC.
The Wild Geese Howard: “Private equity literally wishes money into existence through their over-inflated valuations on assets.“
It’s all just money laundering coming out of the Fed.
Cf USAID.
The Fed always gets the blame, but at most it just makes the problem a little worse. The proximate cause of the problem is Congress’ refusal to act responsibly. The Fed then has to accommodate Congress’ profligacy, without it impacting core inflation. The only answer anyone has come up with far is to make sure the Cantillon Effect is primarily limited to goods not in the core CPI — stocks, hedges, yachts, private jets, etc.
Until Congress is reined in, let’s keep the asset bubbles and price inflation limited to those who are rich enough to afford it.
Steve: “The Fed always gets the blame.”
That’s because the Fed is THE ONLY ENTITY which can create fake money out of thin air.
If there’s fake money in the system, then necessarily it must be coming from the Fed.
All the other entities have to sit back and wait their turn at the trough.
All fake money begins at the Fed.
Nonsense. That’s why I despise a lot of the popular writers of the last half century for having inculcated such hogwash to the point that people believe it. You do the exact same thing when you take out a car loan. There is no money backing that. It’s all faque and ghey, it’s just your promise to repay the note from your future earnings, money that does not exist at this point. Same with your mortgage, same when you write a check, same when you whip out your credit card. But everyone is looking for someone else to pin the… Read more »
I get that it is an unpleasant truth. And children can be forgiven for not accepting or even understanding unpleasant truths. But at some point, one (hopefully) becomes a man and puts aside childish things.
The money supply is increased by debt ? But then the money supply would be decreased when debts are paid off. Not many entities that have such a massive amount of ever-increasing debt that they can move the needle on the inflation meter – the fed gov.
The ones to be despised are the freeby loving non-productives and the clever liars who enable them with thin fictions about how
it’s not really a govt counterfeiting operation because
“The money supply is increased by debt ? But then the money supply would be decreased when debts are paid off.”
Yes. But in aggregate, they never are. Whenever you pay off a car loan, there’s always at least one sucker willing to take on another.
The same would be true if gov’t paid down the debt. Cet. par., money supply would contract. It’s an open question whether private money creation would make up the difference to keep, say, M2 constant. It’s never been tried, but the incentive for private money creation to fill the gap would exist.
MOI: “All fake money begins at the Fed.“
EDIT: Unless there are some GrayBeard Gnomes in the ether who are using their ancient COBOL wizardry to hack new fake money out of the ancient COBOL fake money database.
I’ve often wondered where that particular server lives; the Ur-Server of Fiat Electrons.
Maybe in Armonk?
Unless Honeywell got the contract for storing the fiat electrons, way back circa 1955, in which case, the Old Lady would be churning away in Morristown, NJ?
When I was a kid, folks generally admired millionaires, acknowledging their hard work and PRODUCTIVE contributions to society.
Now billionaires are everywhere, people who basically learned to game and grift the system. They aren’t admired by aware folks, and shouldn’t be because they are takers, not contributors or givers.
This is why I find myself saying “damn, you sound like a commie” (about myself) when talking about the modern high net worth people like billionaires. All the famous ones are just con men. Then they use those ill gotten gains to promote the most evil causes. The old equivalents of billionaires vastly improved the lives of their customers. Henry Ford put a model T in millions of driveways and rockerfeller had brought down the price of Kerosene for lighting and the gas to run the T. This class built libraries and other stuff for the public benefit. They are… Read more »
This is why the term “symbol manipulators” was invented. It frames perfectly those elites who produce nothing material for the benefit of society, but rather juggle numbers and accumulate wealth through arbitrage.
I’ve certainly experienced a bit of arbit-rage over the last several years…
The symbols manipulated are far more than numbers. Status, virtue, identity, story themes, moral values, desires, fears, measurements, comparison, history, perception, reality…our sex, the spirit within, and everything that makes us human. We’re being molded, bred, and retuned to a different frequency. One that is a twisted, faulty caricature of what we are born with…trapping us here, along with the rest. We are their only chance to escape, we are being instinctively hijacked in a doomed effort. Hell’s function is to pull every form of structure back in, material or immaterial, to shred it, break it down, recompose it, due… Read more »
Shit. Please delete everything past the first paragraph, as no one cares about the Why of evil, only the What.
I beg pardon for my foolish excess. I grow tired of my sloth and self pity, of limply repeating myself…the youngers are right. Enough of this. Even an ignorant fool must make the effort. The tree under whose shade one will never sit is a daunting prospect, so what of it?
Ha! I’ve forgotten…I’m already dead! Go then and act like it.
“The tree under whose shade one will never sit is a daunting prospect, so what of it?“
Allusions to this always make me laugh. What could be easier than going to some park, collecting acorns or walnuts or those helicopter things that maples drop, and planting them? One of the holes even gives you a place to leave the dog poop you have in that bag in your pocket.
And, yet, it’s supposed to be some grandiose sacrifice.
I am a wild child but generally follow the Bible. It works for me.
Bible harps on no cheating or scamming the poor folk, no thumb on the scale, unless you want to get stomped by the experts. Bonus points in Scripture if you help out the poor folks and so forth.
Also says don’t lust after wealth as it’ll send ya in the wrong direction, down the death roads instead towards life.
It all seems pretty plain to me.
Short and sweet, an infectious phrase.
They made stuff and employed people. This new billionaire scum manipulates money. They give parasitism a bad name.
Yeah I’d be ok with divesting the Grift Billionaires, call me a commie or a meanie, yawn. Use the money for national infrastructure repair. Theft is theft, and Clever Theft gets an extra thump from me, because these thieves don’t even have the nads to rob directly. In the Sixties, the Ford Foundation was probly THE major private donor of the Civil Rights Movement, which created Protected Castes that enriched and empowered literally everybody except white males. Take a baseball bat to it/them. Rockefeller Foundation? Chief bankroller of the disastrous Feminist Movement. Gonna need a 36 ounce baseball bat for… Read more »
Henry Ford was an “antisemite” and a “racist” Walt Disney is turning in his grave for what Disney has become. Rockefeller would most likely approve of whatever evil they are doing today though. Most of them failed to protect their legacy.
You probly know more, but Henry Ford seemed ok, little rough around the edges. It’s his get that are the problem.
Walt was much more than he seemed. I will leave it at that. At least they made wholesome and instructive (to kids) movies in the old days.
Rockefeller, like Rothschild, smells like evil to me.
“… call me a commie or a meanie, yawn.” I feel the same way. Everything is on the table. I’ve been a fanatic anti-communist since I read “The Gulag Archipelago” when I was 15. Too bad I didn’t follow it up with the part he left out but wrote about later in “200 Years Together” or I might have redpilled much earlier. Communism is certainly not the best system, but what made the early Soviet Union a horror is that it was created by Jews and the foolish goyim who admired them. If the 2nd ‘Russian’ Revolution had been thwarted,… Read more »
“When I was a kid, folks generally admired millionaires, acknowledging their hard work and PRODUCTIVE contributions to society.”
There’s usually been some ambivalence towards the very rich. For example the sceptical attitude towards the 19th century robber barons, which culminated in the anti-trust movement of Teddy Roosevelt in the early years of the 20th century. Or the expose of the meat-packing industry in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book, “The Jungle” (which might turn you into a vegetarian). The cheerleading usually comes from the likes of Ayn Rand and her ilk, where unfettered capitalism is the best of all possible worlds.
As with respect towards Ayn Rand, she’d have decried today’s billionaires. Yes, she had a hard on for capitalists, but never symbol manipulators (see above). All of Ayn Rand’s hero’s produced material things for the benefit of society. All government bureaucrats were the antagonists whom she called “moochers”. I see nothing in today’s political landscape to contradict her insight of 60+ years ago.
She comes with far too much baggage for me. She was a repugnant person. Probably not unrelated, her actual name was Rosenbaum. I despise so-called stage names. It makes me think they are either ashamed of their heritage, whatever it happens to be or that they are hiding something. Given what an anti-Christian bigot she was, she didn’t want people to know her name was Rosenbaum. Even where she had good ideas, it always comes off bad. Her one good point is she was a major anti-Communist.
Yep. Typical of the Tribe to control discussion of both sides of every issue. The major communists were Jews… the major anti-communist/libertarian was a Jewess.
That way, no matter which side wins, the Tribe always wins, too.
Work your butt off and provide product or service, I got no problem with millionaires.
At one time Abraham was the wealthiest man within a thousand miles, tho wealth then was measured in land and livestock, not moolah. Yet, God loved the guy so much He even upgraded his name.
Abraham was a slaveraider who tried to murder his Lord and take his throne rather than obey the order to cease his raids on peaceful neighbors.
Abraham was the Lucifer, the right hand, growing immensely rich and powerful enough to recruit one third of the nobles, off of abusing his government position.
Some saw him as a lesson…others, as an example.
When he had to take his clans and flee into the wasteland, they asked, “How did we get here?” He showed them how to answer that question, as well…lie your ass off and blame a ficticious someone else.
I guess that’s the version in the Book of the Merry Satan.
And people who believe this drivel are a major reason for the slaughter in the Middle East.
It’s a novel, not a documentary. And it’s a novel for a reason — he couldn’t back up all his scandalous claims if he claimed it was all fact.
That’s because there is something admirable about a man who can bring raw materials into one end of a building and spit out cheap manufactured goods out of the other end. They massively increased the number of cheap goods we could buy and the variety. “What will they think of next” was a common saying in the 20th century. I’m not overly romantic about these people. They were generally brutal masters doing things like speeding up the lines to try to get more work out of their workers. Paying shit wages. Taking someone off the premises when a machine removed… Read more »
Capitalism does not account sufficiently for the flaws in human nature.
Such as…
I guess that 30 year old book, “the millionaire next door” needs an update…
It sort of has. Financial advisors are now increasingly distinguishing “decamillionairs”. In short, your millions have to be in double digits before you get respect. The rest of us are “chump change”.
Right. Remember when you only had to have single-digit millions to get on the Forbes’ Richest list? Now any professional who has been semi-diligently funding a 401(k) is a millionaire.
How, exactly, are we worse off? Yachts and private jets and mansions and sports leagues are priced even further out of our means? So? What makes us worse off is when more modest housing, and transportation, and groceries go up. CPI is not tied to increased distance between the rich and poor, but rather from attempts to reduce that gap. Rich people don’t buy more butter than I do, unless they bathe in it or something. The price of butter goes up because people in our wealth category have more money to spend on butter, so we do. Want to… Read more »
This is the part of the Boomer hate I understand. People with bushel-baskets of money show up and distort local markets. Happened in the Pacific Northwest when Californians took their equity and moved somewhere else. Happened in Aspen and Jackson Hole. And, yet, people seem to have a blind spot when it comes to accepting that their own actions have the same effect. The fact that I can go into a car dealership or call a home renovation company and write a check does not mean it’s a good idea. Without my business bidding up the price of their goods… Read more »
I think it’s the “screw you, snowflake, I earned this!” attitude that really galls people.
But at least that part is true. He did earn it, and only green-eyed envy would gainsay that, or feel oppressed by it.
What I object to are the people I see in daily life who go on and on about how “we” are screwing the next generation, when in reality, it’s he and those like him who is doing it.
I’m not sure anybody can earn the right to screw people, but that’s the world we’re living in.
Not really what I meant. When you said, “screw you I earned it”, I assumed you meant “Screw your opinion on whether I can buy a new car. I saved enough to buy it, so you can just fuck off.”
You meant something quite different, I take it?
Yes. Couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “well that’s your problem” over the years. Shortsighted, self-centered thinking in my estimation.
It’s not only inflationary purchases that are wrongheaded, but also the purchase of the wrong things. Hence, any white guy who takes the family to see Snow White–or most other anti-white Hollywood garbage–is casting a vote for anti-white racism. Purchasing Bud Lite and Gillette products is a vote for sexual deviance. And so on and so forth. The dollar is a ballot. How it is cast can encourage or discourage. The choice is in the hands of the consumer.
All true, but it’s very hard to navigate through today’s woke mine field. For example, I never use self-checkout. However there are businesses opening up that don’t take cash. Indeed, the legislation here tried to pass a bill to mandate the taking of cash in addition to CC.
Very true. And truest when the only options are corporate. So, let’s say you despise Nike. What are you gonna do? Purchase Adidas, which is just as unhinged as Nike? And it’s not like there’s a corner store in Ponca City where ma and pa are turning out running shoes. If you really have to have running shoes, you have little choice but to fund afroglobohomo.
The choice may be in the hands of the consumer, but the board of directors is in the hands of someone who hates them.
The answer is always, “Local, local, local.”
Don’t buy swill from A-B, or any megacorp. Buy decent stuff from Tim’s son whose name I always forget who owns a small microbrewery. But not that IPA crap. Buy something to encourage him to make something that tastes like beer.
Don’t go to Snow White and the Seven Audience Members. Most smaller towns have an open mike night, and you can enjoy the local talent.
Yes. Whenever possible, this is certainly the way to go.
2nd: Oh, and thank you Ostei for mentioning Snow White.
Every goddam new movie release it seems is actually selling something other than burgers.
Lotsa sads, but still no reason to believe that the foundational premises are wrong. Don’t be just friggin Antifa. Tell me where I’m wrong. I don’t want to be wrong, so I’m more than happy to admit when I’m wrong, but do me the common courtesy of telling me why I’m wrong.
There was a comment I read at James Howard Kunstler’s site 10 or 15 years ago which has stuck with me all this time for some reason. The commenter said something about how the DOW would be hitting 40k while every city had bread lines.
At the time it seemed like absurd hyperbole. But every time I take my car to the shop, the food bank across the street has a line 20 people deep, and Jim Cramer still has a job arfing like a seal when the line goes up.
This. I didn’t even realize we had a food bank on this part of town until I noticed the traffic jams from people backing up into the street.
Yes, America seems to be following in the footsteps of the decaying Rome of bread and circuses, where famous charioteers were paid fabulous sums, and Michael Jordan becomes a billionaire for playing a child’s game…
The NBA is an interesting example of how social climbing billionaires have destroyed their own market…The predominantly white NBA which played real basketball, that the fans could identify with, was transformed into a 90% black NBA which turned into a 3 point shooting contest….boring, boring, boring…
Don’t forget the aspect of professional sportsball players becoming more and more political as their fame and income increased. Why would Whites continue to support an entertainment venue that hates them? The book “Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America” was written by Laura Ingraham. It was published in 2003 and it seems we are only just catching wise two decades later. Sigh….
The only reason people watch the NBA are for the covert brutality, elbow jabs, and fights. It’s Rollerball.
Actually, the NBA is pansified. You want to watch hardnosed basketball, watch the college game.
It’s been over a quarter century since I paid any heed to the NBA, but I’m aware of it peripherally, and I get the impression that the league is nowhere as negroid as it used to be. A large number of Europeans in the NBA now, and many of them are among the best in the league.
But you’re otherwise right. It sounds very much like they’re playing the dullest basketball possible.
Who is in the line at the food bank?
In my town, when I drive by the line, I see a lot of late model cars driven by muslims or indians apparently gaming the system.
That was the last straw for me. We had a charity that I brought my son to when he was young. It catered to the least and the lost wrt homeless men. Well today that charity has gone big time and actually advertises drive through food service. Yep, no need to sit at a communal table, say prayers, and break bread with fellow tracelers. Now the whole family can hop in the car and get volunteer prepared and packaged bags of cooked food. Wrote my last check to them a number of years ago and never looked back after hearing… Read more »
Moms, a poor woman on SSI, had built a food bank at our little nearby farmtown, run by the aging local wives at the church.
(I didn’t know this, actually. She said nothing when we went a couple times; I was bemused at how all the gals greeted her.)
So, our last trip there, we exited with a small bag of goodies…and right by the door, were two bums, a man and a woman, arguing about their larger bags.
The bank folded shortly after that; this was during the Bush years, when “homelessness” was all the Democrat rage.
I stopped giving my pint of blood a quarter to Red Cross back in 1997 when then hired Elizabeth Dole, then merely Wife of Bob, for $500k a year and she spent $250k redoing her office there.
Same people that are at Goodwill and similar places. It isn’t some impoverished, down-on-their-luck heritage American. It’s a bunch of foreigners buying stuff that the people donating thought was going to the poor.
In my old AO, it was nogs in Mercedes or Escalades from at least out of the county, many from out of the state who were filling up.
“There was a comment I read at James Howard Kunstler’s site 10 or 15 years ago… about how the DOW would be hitting 40k while every city had bread lines”
I dumped a broker back in the late 80s who was dumbfounded at my observation that since P had decoupled from E, without some radical change, I would live to see DOW at 50k. Any advisor who is incapable of understanding trends and cause/effect does not earn a commission from me.
The American economy has become a financialized, coin-shaving Ponzi scheme because Americans have rejected the Protestant Ethic in favor of the Jewish ethic of huckstering and swindling. Karl Marx got it right in his essay “On the Jewish Question”: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. …We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been… Read more »
Which Protestant ethic? I think you are talking about the Scandinavian / German Protestant ethic. If you’re talking about the Brits, piracy and finance has always been their bailiwick.
For that matter, I’ve always been confused as to why the Anglicans are lumped in with the rest of protestantism. To me, they are just dissident Catholics.
I associate England with the agricultural/industrial/scioentific revolutions which allowed England to become wealthy.
Piracy in the 15th and 16th centuries was pioneered by the northern French. Financial games in that era would be the Dutch and northern Italians especially the House of Savoie. The Spanish theft of American silver could also be called piracy; the financial chicanery which the silver aided broke the Spanish empire in the 17th century.
If you’re talkin’ piracy being in the blood then we might need to talk about the Vikings.
The Puritan ethic that says, “It’s only business, so screw you.”
Thus, Mammon became the highest power.
If the NBA were to hit the skids, would we see LeBron James and others testifying before Congress for a bailout? I could imagine it being framed as a civil rights issue. King James needs his mansion because otherwise, MLK would cry.
Where I live the city built the basketball stadium, pays the teams to use it (the WNBA team, too), and shares the whole neighborhood’s parking revenue with them. This includes parking when the stadium is put to other use (which events are said to more than offset the sports subsidy, though that’s not numerically possible), and for all the nearby businesses that the NBA’s presence supposedly sustains (it doesn’t). That barely begins to describe how fake the “market” is. For example, if you buy a ticket for a summer league game—which are so unpopular I’ve been assumed to be part… Read more »
My hometown of 8,000 souls has a public high school of aproximately 900 students. Our h.s. football stadium seats 5,000 plus overflow. We have similarly-sized basketball and hockey facilities despite we are a swimming, golf and tennis school. When did the US dedicate its public school monies to athletics at this scale? If you read Wiki, there is a long list of athletes set forth under the usual school information followed by politicians and actors. Noteworthy inventors, scientists and academic contributors are listed elsewhere if you bother to click on a link, which nobody does. Why do we prioritize sports… Read more »
There’s just a huge market for gullible parents who will pay through the nose because they think their kid is the next TV sportsball idol.
As for bloated public school sports facilities – jobs for the (union) boys, in exchange for votes. Meanwhile, the kids at that school can’t even read…
“Why do we prioritize sports here and try so hard to feed our young to the sports entertainment industry when this is a dead end and enormous time waster for nearly all “athletes?””
Although it has always been this way to an extent, I suspect a bit of AA here wrt Blacks. Where else can we pump such money into minority uplift than to promote about the only aspect the race has some superiority in—sports.
In the entertainment sector, AA for blacks the past three decades was (c)rap ‘music’.
So true about AA for blacks. Then, after the black has accumulated a ton of money in sports or entertainment, his accountants steal it and use it to fund the war on whites.
There is certainly AA with regard to black coaches. And when promoted beyond their limited abilities, they fail. I’m sure the failure rate of black head coaches at the major college and professional levels is far higher than the white failure rate–even factoring in that the negroes have a much longer leash before getting fired–but you’ll never see the NY Times do a story on that.
As with everything else, it’s when people or groups with more money than God show up and distort local economies. In the case of school sports venues, it’s usually the damn government trying to figure out what to spend all that tax money on, so they can get the kickbacks from the contractors.
It’s not about the sports. Its about the skim.
There’s a reason they enshrined “education” in the state constitutions, and forgot about teaching kids useful skills or how to read.
How’s that end? In rich old people moving to Idaho, and poor old people shivering in ghetto slums because they can’t sell their house.
I agree, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for oldsters so set in their ways that they can’t see the handwriting on the wall. If you have to wait until your kids graduate from the high school you should not have sentenced them to in the first place, OK. But after that, if you stuck around based on nostalgia for how it used to be, sorry, no fucks to give. If he really cared about the future generations, he’d have moved to a locale small enough that he could make a difference, and worked to keep the place… Read more »
Because it’s a huge Mammon maker, another grift.
That’s what school bonds are really “investing” in, not in teaching living skills to the next generation.
Those “investors” in school bonds demand a quick return. The municipal pension portfolios depend on it.
And so does the paycheck of the portfolio managers offering this service to the state senator.
The portfolio manager will first fill out the senator’s paperwork to open a “private investment group”, then walk him and his fellow senators through what choices of “investments” they have, be it local school stadiums or section 8 “redevelopment” deals.
I think the WNBA was subsidized by the NBA and USAID, and nobody ever watched that for more than 5 minutes. College softball and volleyball is more popular (for obvious reasons.)
So the NBA is untouchable. I doubt it would fail…it’s basically Chrysler, Olive Garden, and Radio Shack all rolled into one irrelevant monstrosity.
All women’s sports are subsidized by revenue from men’s sports. Nobody watches that crap, but the media sure cram it down our throats as though people are actually sweating buckshot as LaQ’kwee’shia steps up to shoot those free throws.
“Watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus”…..
Damn, you always know how to get my coffee ejecting through my nose!
That said, I never understood the allure of watching a bunch of savages jumping high and putting a ball through a hole.
…..
It’s like horse racing, except the horses are smarter.
Except without horses. Or racing. Just fleas and parasites. Quite the spectator sport, I must say.
I cannot, for love nor money, get my parents (silent generation) to get rid of cable. I’m fifty, and haven’t had cable for over a decade. My children (ages 20,23,25) don’t watch TV, don’t care about sports, and wouldn’t recognize a network news anchor if they ran over them with their car.
My sg parents watch 10-12 hours a day
That ESPN tax model is quickly falling apart. Cable penetration is down to 40% when it used to be 90%. Of course, people are streaming, which is cable in another form, but the combined numbers these days are nowhere near 90%. Way too many people have also dropped cable in favor of Netflix or similar services which also lack the ESPN tax. I think what’s really going on is that the purchasers are “betting” that legalization of sports gambling is going to replace that TV revenue. Future revenue growth is going to come from gambler degenerates. Lately, I’ve been of… Read more »
The using sports to drive viewers to other programming model doesn’t work anymore. Traditional prime time TV ratings are at all time lows. The top shows now have fewer viewers than the 30th ranked show did in 2000. I have heard an argument that the drug companies buy a lot of ads in part to prevent news divisions from running negative reports on them. Even with cable TV revenue I don’t see how this model continues to work. Once the cable revenue completely dries how do they fake it anymore?
Sadly, sportsball in its many forms is something of a religion around the world.
Damn those Greeks!
I thought of these two items: The Celtics do not own their arena, so they lack that asset to supplement their business. Most likely, the franchise is a money-loser by conventional standards. The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. Even though the Celtics don’t own their arena, they probably didn’t have to pay for it directly. As we all know, city and state governments deem it SO ESSENTIAL that they have… Read more »
Remember how in 2020 all “nonessential” things were shut down but the NFL, MLB, and NBA still played? The regime takes an interest in seeing that the circuses go on. It’s a high priority. To them, it’s “essential.” Which explains their eagerness to fund it with public money.
That isn’t quite right. The NBA season was stopped in March and didn’t resume until October where it was held in a “bubble” where no one was supposed to get in or out. There were several scandals around it as many players were sneaking in comfort women. After the riots in honor of St. George Floyd it was obvious having sports resume to distract the rioters was a smart move. Yet there was still major resistance to having the games, college football was delayed and teams played a shortened schedule.
Unfortunately, that’s the way it seems to work. Universities use sports as marketing for their institutions. They call it their front porch. Cities use it for the same reason. It’s like naming rights on an arena. It just gets you exposure. At the University level, think of sports ball as a Halo product. It’s like the Chevy Corvette or the Dodge Viper. Likewise with cities who use it to market themselves. It’s also very cost-effective compared to having to pay for that kind of marketing. It is a powerful marketing tool, especially at the local level. Ohio State, for example,… Read more »
Interestingly, the big sports schools, particularly in the SEC, have become magnets for smart white boys who have basically been frozen out by the Ivies and near-Ivies. Sports are a big part of the social scene, but it’s not the “Animal House” of 30 or 40 years ago. Getting a marketable education is the priority.
As an added bonus, the girls are prettier and more feminine. Very entitled, though.
You probably have better odds of winning the lottery than of finding an attractive woman in AINO who isn’t entitled
I’ve often wondered if that connection most of us see between a woman being attractive and being nuts has to do with something lacking with them emotionally or mentally, so they overcompensate by working hard on their appearance.
Amen to that.
Stop manufacturing feral princesses, people.
And they are rarified too and they know it. As the population becomes more and more brown and swarthy the white girls who are still thin and attractive are becoming unicorns. Where I am, Eastern Europe? Every 3rd one is like this and every 5th one is model hot and I’m not even kidding. It is an odd thing here this abundance of smoking hot women who also happen to be economically depressed. This is a good place to be a a single man, perhaps the best place. But many of them are ruthless mercenaries and know JUST how to… Read more »
I’m still grinding my teeth over the 2020 Indianapolis 500 being run without fans in August, rather than its traditional Memorial Day weekend date. (Thanks IU Health, you pansies) 😒
“socialize the costs”
I heard a guy on the radio yesterday telling his listeners what their share of the national debt was.
Screw that guy. I don’t owe those bastards anything.
What happens when the bubble bursts? What happens when pension funds are no longer solvent due to mismanagement? What happens when illegals are no longer given free medical care under Medicaid? What happens when Ukrainians realize that they have been screwed over by the West resulting in millions dead and wounded? What happens when the dollar is devalued by 90%. What happens all those chickens come home to roost at the same time?
Then it gets frisky, fast.
That’s when you praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, LOL.
Some pension funds certainly are mismanaged, but that’s not the norm. However, if most pension funds go belly up, then the total economy is in collapse and we have bigger problems. See ya all in the breadline…
“See ya all in the breadline…”
Amen, bro. But it my case, it won’t be because I need it, but because I don’t want to stand out as not needing it.
It isn’t just emergency rooms. Go to once pristine national parks where you could once canoe peacefully down a beautiful forest lined river with your love. You could watch the eagles and ospreys fly overhead and then stop on a bank and have a peaceful picnic – maybe make out a little and keep the flame alive. Now, the banks are littered with garbage and hordes of screaming kids and an extended family of muy gordita grandparents and endless uncles aunts. They blast their goofy music that sounds like a car alarm going off as someone is trying to break… Read more »
Thanks, good post.
All you have to do is put the parking lots miles from the parks. Not a single swarthy or darker complexion within miles. Still way too many lefties, but there are plenty of good places for shallow graves…
Pro tip: Always carry a set of dikes or lineman’s pliers so you can cut the crossbow bolt and and throw the two parts off a bridge on your way home.
Hehe
I have long been baffled by the continued increase in valuation of NBA teams and the increased value of TV contracts, considering ratings have totally cratered. None of the arguments put forward by NBA shills pass the smell test, in fact all the other sports – including MLB, which ESPN buried over a decade ago – are doing fine ratings-wise. Nobody under the age of 40 or so watches the NBA, a lot follow it like a soap opera, but the amount of people who actually care about the NBA day-to-day is vanishingly small. It’s like a situation where the… Read more »
‘Of course, the new owners do not care about the business side. They are billionaires who want to be in the billionaire club’ Right. Most sports-club ownerships are vanity purchases. Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys is a good example. Loves the limelight, teevee interviews, likes to hear the sound of his own voice. It’s a way to say, ‘Everybody lookit me! I’m rich ‘n powerful!’ Forty years ago, the NBA was extremely popular, because America was a society of men, including young men with athletic backgrounds like me, who related directly to sports teams and programming. Just as important,… Read more »
I remember seeing a football or hockey game on TV with a woman announcer…felt like I was being lectured to the entire time! Like any other male-centric institution in this country, the women can’t let us have ANYTHING.
Ain’t that the truth. I turn off the sound, usually, with female sports announcers. It’s a man’s domain, should remain a man’s domain, and women’s place in it should be cheerleading.
I more or less agree, but because women do a horse-shit job of reporting sports. If they did as good a job, I’m not sure I’d care. Though I pay no attention to sports in the first place, and couldn’t tell you who was doing a good job at it…
I may be a financial ignoramus, but here I agree with the Left: there should be no billionaires
I dunno. If you’re able to make a billion by creating a better mousetrap, good on you. In theory anyway. But in our system, it seems as if possibly even the majority of billionaires never turned a profit in the traditional sense. Particularly odious are ones such as Susan Wojcicki (who’s been in the news lately) who became one by founding a company that has done nothing but lose money and is now bankrupt. Or was it just alimony from her ex husband. Speaking of which, there is a prominent, if not exactly new, distinct class of female baizuo billionaire… Read more »
Joan Kroc left $300 million to the US Poetry Foundation in Chicago.
They proceeded to spend a giant chunk of it on a new headquarters.
Anyone notice a huge flowering in poetry output during the past 20 years?
Roses are red
Violets are blue
We’ve got our cash
So screw you – US Poetry Foundation
Fleas
Adam
had
’em.
A million dollars, please.
You can’t fool me!
That was AI Generated. 😒
The title might have been. When I was a little kid, I read that in a book my grandma had. The original title was something like, “A Concise Treatise on the Antiquity of Fleas.”
that’s the thing; it doesn’t come from building a better mousetrap. It’s made by “financialization” which I don’t understand at all. Again, i may be stupid, but i don’t understand it. Also, a lot of it is made by alignment with deep state/CIA.
In a perfect world, yeah Joe Shmo should have a billion bucks because he made something really useful. But should Ramaswamy have a billion? Should there be people worth 50, 100, 200 billion? A trillion? Do they create that value? Are they a million times better and more useful than a really good plumber?
fakeemail: “financialization” which I don’t understand at all Ultimately, it’s all just money laundering emanating from the federal reserve. Ever since Black Monday of 1987, there have been precisely two classes of hominids in the USA: A) Those hominids who have access to the free flow of laundered money originating from the Federal Reserve, and B) Everyone else. You don’t understand “financialization” because you belong to Class B), rather than to Class A). Whereas the parasitic psychopaths which constitute Class A) were born & bred to suck the life out of the host nation’s economy. Setting aside the JQ, the… Read more »
‘… there is a prominent, if not exactly new, distinct class of female baizuo billionaire who got it from her ex husband and then plows gobs of it into every degenerate leftist homo cause she can find in a directory’
There is a lot of this, absolutely, pursuant to the mass transfer of wealth from males to females during the past half-century.
On the male side, you’ve got Rumpaswampy.
A rare (and interesting) example of a self made “legitimate” female billionaire is JK Rowling. But then of course she (a) famously became a non-billionaire by giving so much of it away, and (b) infamously was Hurled Into The Void (™Z) for rejecting the trannies, thus becoming as bad as Trump, and accordingly Hitler? Or maybe just Eva Braun? It’s so hard to keep up….
I’ve only ever watched one NBA game in my life. A guy I worked with told me he had courtside tickets to a Denver Nuggets game and asked if I wanted to go. This was in 1999. I remember being shocked because he didn’t seem like a sportsball fan, and had a reputation of being a PITA grouch. So I went because why not, try new things, make a friend, and the seats were indeed court sided…my feet were on the court. Next to the cheerleaders. About halfway into the game I noticed one of the cheerleaders had a knee… Read more »
Nicely done! Most of the dance team/cheerleaders are never approached by guys because of the intimidation factor, so kudos to your courage.
I thought for sure I’d get tackled by security. It was a cool moment. She didn’t even hesitate. You would have thought we knew each other.
They remember our kisses long after we’ve forgotten their names
You guys bothered to learn their names?
It was a different time, a different world.
The big change in sports team valuations has been the leagues’ permitting private equity funds (as opposed to private equity moguls as individuals) to invest in teams. This has driven valuations to unprecedented heights as new pools of owners/money are tapped. It’s also worth noting that the NBA draws global interest. Foreigners don’t understand or like American football, hockey and baseball have limited appeal, but many like/follow basketball. When I was in Asia and Japan a few years back, I was astonished how knowledgeable the kids there were about the NBA. All that said, the prices now seem stupid to… Read more »
All four sports leagues have tight limits on private equity. The Celtics case is the test as it will have majority PE. Up until now the cap was around ten percent, so PE has not played a role until maybe now. Odds are, the Celtics deal gets restructured to conform to the rules on PE ownership.
Private equity keeps trying to buy their way into college football, but the Big Ten and the SEC have no interest. (The Big Ten has decided to hear proposals, however.) One of the reasons I support my alma mater’s teams is because when I pay $11 for a Diet Coke at the stadium, at least I’m helping the school. My money isn’t going into some bankster’s pocket. If it ever gets to the point where we have the KKR Alabama Crimson Tide, the Bain Capital Michigan Wolverines (after all, the Mitt Romney is from Michigan) and the Black Rock Ohio… Read more »
I struggle to maintain interest in college football. The television presentations are so awful I usually watch with the sound off, but that still makes for an unenjoyable product.
First, if you’re lucky enough to be a fan of a big university, you’re getting network quality programming, but I get what you’re saying about the shoddy production value. But the new paradigm seems to be about gambling. I’m sure they’ll figure out ways to gamble on all kinds of things like pole vaulting and all kinds of revenue streams will come raining down on the banksters.
The gambling angle has a limit too, as that industry discovered when the Injun casinos began proliferating everywhere. There are only so many people who are willing to gamble, and only so much they are willing to bet. Putting aside the aspect of scandal, which I am sure has already been suppressed.
As said before, pol’s are whores for money. A few years ago, betting online on all sports became legal in AZ due to a concerted effort by “big gambling”. It took 50 years however since the lottery was made legal here in AZ, but it was inevitable.
“I struggle to maintain interest in college football.” That’s because you’ve not had the benefit of a close and inside look as I’ve had after 30+ years inside a major university. You’d have no problem writing off college football support. Some highlights of wife and I: —Tutoring players who could not write their name on an essay paper. They could not even write a coherent sentence as well. Were talking work at the third grade level at best! —Being told by Athletic Department staff to never be alone with players you are assigned to tutor due to personal danger (wife/rape/etc).… Read more »
A frat bruh related the following exchange by one of our NBA-bound basketball players in psych class.
Professor: Would any of you murder someone close to you for a million dollars?
Bbal Player: (only “student” to raise hand) Sheeit, I’d do it for ten thousand.
P: Wouldn’t you worry about imprisonment?
Bb: Sheeit no. I’d leave the country.
P: Where would you escape to?
Bb: Hawaii.
Or so he claimed.
Joe Sobran nailed it 30 years ago.
We’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.
Marc Lasry has already discussed this. It’s sickening obviously. But with the NIL revolution and the teams/schools needing more $ to be competitive, it could happen. As Zman has said, all social capital will be privatized and exploited.
Yup, I saw that video. Pass.
Right. But the valuations ran up in anticipation of the private equity ownership rules changing/getting more flexible. Everyone here in NYC has been talking about this since Covid.
One other key thing I should point out is that many team owners are buying up real estate around the stadia/arenas and making money on ancillary businesses and RE development. The Red Sox owners did this very effectively. The Las Vegas deals revolved around RE redevelopment.
Not buying up real estate around the area was Walt Disney’s mistake when he made Disneyland. He created this big attraction, but saw all the real profits go to those who owned hotels and motels in the outlying areas. So when he built a new park in Orlando, he knew he needed land big enough for not just the attractions but also hotels.
For us locally, you can see the next move. Fanduel has bought out the local sports station. Used to be PASS, then FoxSports, then Bally, now Fanduel. They are going to start restricting certain sport events to pay per view. You kinda see that with Amazon and Thursday nite football. The future will be, “Oh boy! Classic match up! Packers-vs-Bears! Wait, it’s pay per view…”
That is the death spiral boxing followed. My bet is college sports die first then arena sports like hockey and basketball. Baseball, strangely enough, is the most financially stable sport because it relies on the live gate and it controls its development system. It remains very old fashioned.
If you know anything about the business of college sports, and I don’t claim to be an expert but I do know more than the average person, it functions basically as their marketing department. Keeps alums connected to the university which results in donations and endowment money, creates halo marketing for the university to reach out to the general public. Without sports, a university is just a glorified office park. (That is in addition to the other things that it purports to do when it comes to the advancement of education.) My high school keeps sending me stuff for their… Read more »
Amazingly, college football stadium attendance is flat and has been for many years.
Well, when you are consistently filling up Ohio Stadium or even Iowa State stadium, you can’t really get much better than that. I don’t know about the third tier teams
Our stadium is recessed in a giant pit. It included footings for another stadium on top. We’ve discussed adding another 60-100k seats, which could bring the total to 200k+, although nobody can answer the why question. We’re televised,and this would cut into live attendance presumably. Ann Arbor is pretty crazy on game day as it is. But if demand is there, I could see expansion beyond 200k.
There is at least one exception to your rule (so perhaps it can be done), the University of Chicago. They once had sports, then eliminated them. Their reputation has not suffered as they are well known among elite universities.
Well, they still have sports, just not big time sports. My cousin’s kid played on the basketball team there. I also read something about how there was resentment on the West Coast back in the 1940s or 1950s because USC was seen as new money. They were riding their sports success and were an academic wannabe. Of course, the academic blue bloods turned their nose up at that.
Of course, it worked for USC. It’s a very good institution and hard to get into. I don’t know where they rank in terms of research or anything like that though.
You are correct—Div III. I should have made myself more clear, but the emphasis of the NCAA is gone. I have no problem with true amateur sports without the scholarship and alumni nonsense. This is why, at the end, I only watched women’s sports at my old university. They seemed to be having fun.
Also, Boomers.
The other thing is that college football is the nation’s second popular sport, or so I’ve read recently. I think they use TV ratings as their metric. I believe it.
In the south, college football has been bigger than Jesus for a long time. And Jesus is pretty darn big in the south. So it would be surprising if it died easily.
It’s also important in places like Des Moines / Ames Iowa. What else is there to do on a Saturday afternoon other than watching an Iowa State or Iowa football game?
Between the out-of-control transfer portal and ridiculous NIL money payouts college football is simply just another pro sport that retains its former traditions only in the most vestigal sense.
It also helps that Triple-A baseball is a very good product in its own right and offers a high-quality fan experience.
I’ve always admired the PGA [golf] and the ATP [tennis]. Those Bros are smart fellows, they all have strong business sense, and they have no desire whatsoever to be Hymen Shekelstein’s pet goy. They’re individualists who own themselves. I guess the fellows in the NFL & the NBA just didn’t have the gray matter necessary to make the transition from wagie to owner. https://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wagie /pol/ has been doing yeomen’s work in trying to ridicule the poor wage slaves [who will hopefully suffer enough from the humiliation of it that eventually they will see the light and stop being wage slaves].… Read more »
I’m old enough to remember when the Chicago White Sox went on pay-per-view with SportsVision in the early 1980s and lost a ton of cash on it, while the Chicago Cubs went with WGN (and stole Harry Carey from the White Sox) while expanding their reach and fan base with WGN being a “Super Station” added to multiple cable networks. Pretty much tilted the local coverage to The Loveable Losers permanently. Wrigley became THE place to be. I’m struggling to understand how many people are going to pony up cash to watch a game you used to be able to… Read more »
pay per view is a dead model. I’m an avid MMA watcher (UFC). let’s just say there are ways to watch PPV’s without having to pay the devil mouse (who owns the PPV broadcast rights). Most other nations don’t even do the PPV.
I bet they drop it soon, the numbers decline all the time.
The administration talks the same way about the global economy. The feeling is that the world is freeloading off of our defense umbrella, the dollar as the global reserve currency and access to our market. Trump is trying to dismantle that system.
In particular, the administration understands the toll that being the reserve currency takes on the US and the benefit that the world gets from being able to use the dollar. (Yes, we get benefits too, but we also get costs.)
Miran lays it out nicely here:
CEA Chairman Steve Miran Hudson Institute Event Remarks – The White House
The real driver of the global economy is the eurodollar system. There are more dollars outside the US than in.
What the demand is for, is for safety and liquidity, of the settlements.
That is, the settlements between the banks and nonbanks themselves.
This is why the eurodollar has gone from $1 trillion in 1980 to $36 trillion in 2025, because both banks and nonbanks (hedge funds, equity funds, traders) don’t pay much or any attention to inflation, consumer prices, or the normal “real world” economy.
I think the fever of taxpayers being bled white to support playgrounds for billionaires while our civilization-sustaining infrastructure such as water mains, bridges, streets and sewers crumble is starting to break. The Tampa Bay Rays had a billion-dollar stadium deal, but their hedge fund owner bailed because he couldn’t pay for his end of the deal and now the team will play in the Yankees’ spring training park. Same for the Athletics, who are now in Sacramento playing in a minor league ballpark with NO bathrooms attached to the dugouts and holding news conferences for the sports “reporters” in a… Read more »
Two Things: 1) LOVE the Lee Elia rant. Heard it a day or two after it happened. Really put a hole in the “Bleacher Bum” myth of the Cubs fans. “because if they’re the real Chicago f-ckin’ fans, they can kiss my f-ckin’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.” 2) The league is now a few coastal teams with billionaires seeking to win titles by writing checks while the rest of the also-rans function as a developmental league (imagine a minor league level above Class AAA) for the big clubs. These teams have no hope and their ownership can’t afford… Read more »
Why would anyone want to watch a sport where a few bluebloods dominate everything (or in the case of IndyCar, a few well-financed teams)?
Look at the NCAA Tournament. There used to be upsets galore, especially on that glorious first couple of days with wall-to-wall hoops. Now, the bigger schools can buy players and any player that has talent will jump ship to the bigger bag.
It’s little wonder that all four No. 1 seeds advanced to the Final Four.
Here’s another example of Z’s excess:
A’s hire investment firm to secure additional $500M for Vegas stadium: report
Absolutely NOBODY – in Vegas or Oakland – wants this relocation to happen, but the owner. $380 million in Vegas taxpayer dollars already pledged for the new $1.5 billion stadium, but they’re struggling to meet the $500 million shortfall with private investment:
Athletics Owner John Fisher Breaks Silence on Las Vegas Move Timeline Amid Their $550 Million Headache | PFSN
No sane investor wants to touch this with a bargepole. Why is this project even moving forward?
There were loads of investors lined up for this deal when originally proposed. But the deal got worse when the City got more involved and the money guys stepped back. It’s a long saga apparently.
Vegas just doesn’t have the fanbase for the A’s. It’s Dodger territory. The Raiders could move to LV because the city is swarming with Raider yo-dawgs and dayyum-gurlz, but the A’s will be playing to half-empty stadiums.
Raider yo-dawgs and dayyum-gurlz
the incipient Pajeet Tsunami
Hymen Shekelstein’s pet goy
feral princesses
Also, Boomers.
Good gods I love you people
Meanwhile the A’s, who now have no city affiliation in their name, being simply known as the Athletics, are playing in a minor league stadium in West Sacramento for the next three seasons.
Just a few years ago Oakland had three major league franchises. It now has none.
Similar thing happening now in AZ with the baseball team, the Diamondbacks, threatening to leave if yet another new stadium is not built for their owners benefit—to be paid for by taxpayer levy as was the first 25 years ago. Here’s a good summary from an old analyst/detractor of sportsball summary, Andrew Zimbalist. From ChatGPT: Andrew Zimbalist, a well-known sports economist and professor at Smith College. He’s one of the most prominent voices critical of public subsidies for professional sports stadiums and teams. Key Findings from Zimbalist’s Work: • Negative Return for Taxpayers: Zimbalist has consistently argued that public funding… Read more »
I think it depends on the city. Phoenix has enough going for it that a baseball team isn’t going to make much of a difference one way or another. Besides, baseball is in decline. If you’re a Cincinnati, it’s a different story. Cincinnati is a fine place, but without pro sports, they will never be able to generate any kind of buzz for themselves. Cincinnati is a fine Metro area, but nobody will ever hear about it or even think about it if it doesn’t have any kind of pro team. It really does help marketing efforts. And I don’t… Read more »
You fail to read or acknowledge the points made in my comment from long standing research in the area of economic benefit. You’ve stated an opinion, fine. The publications from Zimbalist are backed up by years of study and research. Your arguments are precisely the ones made by every political entity in these communities, but never supported by analysis after the deed is done. Pol’s love to spend taxpayer money with all sorts of made up benefits as excuses. The fact of the matter is that all these communities are taxed to construct a stadium primarily for sportsball owners’ benefit,… Read more »
Why am I limited to one upvote?
I’ve seen those studies for years. I used to even be on your side on this issue. But when you’ve been on this Earth for a while, you start to realize that some things just are the way they are. I don’t see any cities going bankrupt because they’re building stadiums. I also don’t see any cities falling behind because they put their money into a stadium instead of, say, daycare.
Problem is no city is putting that money where it makes a positive difference — growing the business sector. The closest you can get is TIF and boondoggles for the politically connected. If you look under the hood, that’s what’s in common with all the entities who are pledging capital investment in the US under the Trump tariffs. Sure they will cram a bunch of money in fast to get the early profits, but when that starts to wane, they will remove the equipment and leave the relatively cheap building to collapse into decrepitude. It’s the story of all government… Read more »
I knew a young, very rich lad (bought out by Halliburton in the Northwest Territories, Canada) who found an undiscovered, sealed-up basement speakeasy in Cincinatti. With all the original accoutrements intact, covered in dust. It had sat there since the end of Prohibition.
Since my formative years were working in a small, legendary casino, along with other experience, good heavens what I would’ve done with that place.
It could’ve become a Name…but no, he’s a typical American capitalist, so there it sits still.
Oh wow. I’d love to see pictures of that.
Zimbalist seems like one of those guys who thinks he will convince people if he can get them to look at his charts and graphs. That stuff is all completely beside the point. To the regime, paying to keep the circuses going is money well spent.
I for one enjoy the new revolutionary outlook of Z. May he escape the eye of Sauron for as long as possible.
This may not be worth anything, but CNBC has an estimated value of every NBA team. This would give the total a market cap of $1.4 trillion while TV revenue, their major source of income is $76 billion and divided among the teams. I would assume Boomers are holding up the cable TV and eventually that business model will also go through an upheaval. If any of the data in the CNBC graph is accurate, a few teams have more debt than revenue which would normally be a red flag to investors and financial partners. The problem with evaluating this… Read more »
You may be off by a zero there Bernard (maybe $140B, not 1.4 T)
Thanks. Still seems wildly inflated.
Great analysis – I expect the rest of Trump’s presidency to be the most interesting in living memory. Those people dependent on the old system will have to adapt, or die.
“The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital.” Not so fast. In the USA there are still many powerful people who are devoted to dark projects like breaking up and plundering Russia, conquering (or destroying) China, establishing worldwide unipolar democracy, and making Jerusalem into the capital of the world. They have at least five major problems however if the USA is to be the primary tool for accomplishing… Read more »
It is true likely what you say in terms of the motivation. However, rather than being fully cynical and thinking the masters of this mess are all powerful, there is another perspective. In Trump, at least the reforms provide an opportunity for castle building and bolstering our position. The Harris marionette provided no such opportunities. It was instant death and then the Mass White Sacrifice. In the types of reforms Trump is doing are many cracks and opportunities for the American Alerics to position themselves. They just have to be more reliable and competent partners than the DIE brigades. This… Read more »
That’s just wishful thinking. Heelsup Harris was the better opportunity. The victors would have overreacted by immediately intensifying their long war to destroy us, and this would have pushed tens of millions very quickly in the direction of apostasy. A window of opportunity would have opened to persude those millions that the USA was born bad and can’t become otherwise, because she originated among cryptozionists, idiots, revolutionary sophists, and scam artists. Meanwhile the financial and industrial conditions would have continued to deteriorate. Cracks would be forming and widening into canyons in which to organize replacment systems for our own people.… Read more »
“..this would have pushed tens of millions very quickly in the direction of apostasy…”
You have not met my huwhyte neighbors. You could rape their daughters and they would not be “pushed” into anything but ‘understanding the plight of the immigrant…’
Or that worthless dad in Texas whose kid was stabbed through the heart at a track meet a week ago who has already forgiven the worthless nog who stabbed him. A nog, I’d add, who has already raised over a quarter of a million dollars on “Christian” site GiveSendGo.
“understanding the plight of the immigrant”
Sad, isn’t it? Israel’s mendacious propaganda about being foreigners in Egypt has been a great inspiration for Israel and others when devising tactics to cripple suckers with tears for the other. Possibly Charlemagne, too, fell for it. It’s baked into his religion, too, of course. If so, this could explain his willingness to allow termites to migrate into his realm from the Mediterranean region. A reward granted for that traitor’s services (which included great massacres) has been a smear about him being “anti-Semitic”, as if that were a bad disposition to have.
4 years of Harris would have meant another 20 million (at least) wogs imported. That would have been The End. Wouldn’t have mattered what kind of backlash she inspired, because it couldn’t have overcome the math. Maybe it already can’t. But perhaps there’s still some hope for meaningful deportations. The jew york post said a week or so ago that Trump admin deportations were north of 100,000, not where it needs to be but not bad for the first two months. And more than people thought.
Maybe. It sounds more like a recipe for total, mass demoralization leading to a final capitulation. Then another 20, 30, 40 million invaders being resettled and it is hard to see how you can use that as a springboard for turning things around.
What you describe sounds like a rout. I don’t know of any military strategy where welcoming a rout turns the battle in your favor.
About 250 yrs ago, other reason makers were crying in pain about “Oppressions” such the king stirring up “merciless Indian Savages”. We are led to believe by their agitprop that the mIS were poised to overrun the empire’s colonies along the Atlantic coast.
And now I’m reminded of the utility of planting DJT in the WH for the 250th anniversary of the partition. You fell for that ploy, too.
Private equity is vacuuming up everything, especially housing. There are plenty of ads on the TV (and mail offers) with some guy offering to buy your home for cash on an expedited basis. I have always suspected that these guys are fronting for some private equity business. They see a world where they own everything, you own nothing but you will be happy.
I don’t worry about those things very much. If there really are even a million late Millennial, GenZ and early GenA who want an affordable future, all they have to do is be willing to pick up a hammer, a pipe wrench, a sheet metal brake, a wirestripper and linemans pliers, heck, anything trades related, and there would be enough housing to drop the bottom out of the market. The simple fact is that there simply are not that many who are willing to do that. Being a keyboard warrior is about their highest aspiration. And if Congress doesn’t get… Read more »
Is this before or after the people with more money than God show up to distort the local economy, or in this case the economies of many locales at once? This, and this alone, is why people like me cannot wait for people like you, your ways, and their memory to fade from the world. Not because you got yours, but because you will eventually backtrack on every one of your own holy dogmas when explanations for why others haven’t got theirs that you find comforting have been exhausted. In this thread alone you’ve swung from smugly asking which aspects… Read more »
In the business we get literally dozens of spam calls a week asking if we want to sell properties. They’re relentless.
I’m sure somebody said it was a sign of the end times back when Babe Ruth signed a contract for $70,000 a year. I felt something similar when Apple’s market cap topped $1 trillion. Next thing you knew it was $2 trillion. But the strategically targeted inflation, aka financialization, has pretty much run its course. We know this because of the new tariff regime. If it was still working, that wouldn’t be happening. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean inflation has ended, but it could mean that the regime’s ability to direct and target it towards certain assets has. This economy… Read more »
The next phase of looting will be directing the inflation to come crashing back onshore by selling off even more of the nation. The entire model is still one of massive amounts of capital financing some venture. The 16th – early 20th century was done on the backs of low capital inventors in garages. It took large amounts of capital to produce those goods. I wonder if there is some path to invention/innovation that produces more capital than it consumes and requires much less capital to seed it. Supposedly that was software, but it didn’t really work that way. As… Read more »
The NBA is financed, in large part, by taxes it levies on every household. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system. DOGE really flushed to the surface the degree to which the luxury waste is subsidized by the least among us. The tariff contretemps exposed the utter disdain the ruling class and its agents and whores have for the host of these parasites. I don’t know what all will change as a result of… Read more »
I hope you are right . But the next step is the colleges . They are now bundling schools like they did with mortgages and selling them to ‘ investors’
I’m a little late this morning sorry!
Excellent post by da Z-dawg!
Also, there is the question of billionaires using leveraged takeovers to then treat the franchise as an ATM:
Man Utd: 7 shocking numbers behind the Glazers’ reign at Old Trafford
Interesting times.
So, stocks are out. Bonds have been out for a while. Crypto is out. Real estate might be already maxxed, and if immigration is better controlled the upward pressure will abate. Cash loses value daily. PMs might be viable but are pretty bid-up already. What’s left?
Hookers and blow and devil take tomorrow?
I’m not convinced crypto is out (which is not a prediction on what its value will be in any given time frame). Our overlords seem to have developed an affinity for it.
What’s left?
Commodities. Private equity holds in mining and manufacturing. Sea as well as air drone manufacturing. Nuke plants and operators. Air taxi operators and infrastructure.
There are many opportunities. Wish I had the stomach for Bitcoin. My nephew went all in for years when it was under $10. He’s comfortably retired with a diversified portfolio at the ripe ol’ age of 35. Spends his time raising two white sons outside of Boston, the wife still works so she doesn’t have to answer to him. Not a good sign methinks.
“wife still works so she doesn’t have to answer to him”
Holy Moly. The rent/buy proposition on females is getting lopsidedly biased toward ‘rent’. I haven’t always been fully satisfied with living like a monk, but stories like that make me content with it.
Thanks for the ideas.
Your nephew did it right. I was aware of Bitcoin in 2010. I regret not tossing $5 or $10k into it then, or even a few years later.
Hookers and blow
Too late! Hunter took it all.
Rural land. Guns. Clean water sources. Agricultural equipment. A good set of tools. An old, but reliable truck that doesn’t have any silly computers or fancy gewgaws.
Those are all great investments that I have.
“PMs might be viable but are pretty bid-up already.“
IMO, silver is still being suppressed for some reason. But don’t think of it as market manipulation. Think of it as a subsidy for buying silver.
This article cogently & concisely explains the asset bubble economy that we have been living thru for many years. If it’s over now, then big changes are in stare for us. I have always wondered about these so-called “asset managers”. Why are there so many of them? How do they get their billions? How do they “create” wealth? I think they use financial legerdemain to steal it and to destroy our social capital. And massive tax breaks. All perfectly legal, of course. Trump’s tariffs caused me some grief, when he first declared them, even before he took office.… Read more »
“I have always wondered about these so-called “asset managers”. Why are there so many of them? How do they get their billions? How do they “create” wealth?” I run my business on a different fiscal year, largely to avoid the end of year fluctuations that always result from wash sales. But every stinking year at this point in April, I get really cranky when I look at my consolidated statements and reflect that because of the f-ing government, I have to have “managers” fill out paperwork for the f-ing goverment, and they always, ALWAYS underperform my internet trading account. I… Read more »
They are probably betting on gambling as the new revenue stream. Professional and college sports are evolving away from being sports leagues to more gambling platforms.
i can tell Zman hasn’t cut the cord yet. i don’t have a cable tv subscription so i don’t subsidize sports and all the crappy bundled channels. neither do other folks who get content through streaming. there has been a steady erosion of revenue to espn and other sports dependent businesses.
boxing used to be the biggest sport in the US back in the 30s and 40s, but it is pretty marginalized now. the negroazation of that sport lead to its decline, same as the nba. just like any public place where nigs are prevalent.
I have not had cable since the Obama admin.
I don’t know about how PE will rip a profit from their models — probably from gambling — just another grift to extract social capital from the natural fan base: white men. It likely will mean a steady decline in public interest despite extracting enough profits to make it work. It’s the gambling that bothers me. And the negroes.
It is easier to make fun of a money-based economy, which functions as an adjunct to the banks, than to analyze it dispassionately. From a financial rewards sense, it is immensely more lucrative to own a major node of the global financial system like the modern London stock exchange than it would have been to own 100 cotton-processing plants in a Midlands port town. Money is the lubricant that makes economies go. If you devalue it through debasing the coinage (in olden times) or constipating the process by tight credit (today) you harm businesses across the board, not just expanding… Read more »
Poetic writing does not make up for substance, but nice try. The problem is not how much money you make, but in how you make it. Symbol manipulators do not add as much to the economy as you propose. Many of the billionaires we have today are in that class. Debasing money is a fact not in evidence here.
Didn’t the LA Dodgers pay some Japanese player named Sean O’Tawny like 6 gorillion dollars to play American Rounders?
I am the furthest thing from Mackenzie Bezos, but even I think that cash would be better spent teaching kids in Baltimore how to read rather than on some sportsballer’s house, vehicle, and mistresses.
“even I think that cash would be better spent teaching kids in Baltimore how to read” Do you know who those keeyids are? A thousand downvotes to your comical foolishness, Marko. The correct amount for teaching those bad demons to read is $0/yr. Zero per year, every year. Same as the correct amount for subsidizing their reproduction. First you teach those narcissistic beasts to read. Soon they can control city governments for the globalists. Demagogues arise among them to demand vast amounts of loot (the MLK Jr plan) because social justice. They want and get a “Congressional Black Caucus” (founded… Read more »
Nah, those “kids” will never learn how to read, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.
Players are underpaid compared to management, nominal owners, etc. Of course some of them are overpaid, because player contracts are wagers, but overall, and especially in the case of “stars,” they’re getting ripped off. Michael Jordan is the most underpaid employee in world history. Scarcity = price, approximately, says the Law. A position only a dozen men can possibly fill will pay far more than, say, CEO of PepsiCo, which at the very least many millions of us would do no worse than whatever moron is doing it now. (You don’t know who that is because it doesn’t matter who… Read more »
I think you would have to teach those barbarians to read and write at gunpoint. The cash method has been tried and failed spectacularly.