No doubt the infamous tulip bubble was a great example of this.
The average price of a single flower exceeded the annual income of a skilled worker and cost more than some houses at the time. As prices drastically collapsed over the course of a week, many tulip holders instantly went bankrupt.
US dollar is a Malinvestment. I believe this is the case because sense its inception, the US dollar has lost over 96% of its value. This makes it a terrible place to allocate capital or store your value/wealth. Another example would be treasury bonds, with such extremely low interest rates, You will be lucky if you even protect your capital from inflation.
USA military funding is a malinvestment, gets more funding than actual science from the taxpayer which is paying for wars that only profit the military-industrial complex.
In Argentina we have so many that I don’t know where to start or which one to choose…
Here the central bank is offering fixed term deposits at 24,50% annual rate. Wait, it seems high, but don’t hurry, it is a scam.
Why is it? Here we have between 45 to 50% annual inflation, in January the ARS/USD was 63 ARS =1 USD, and today 14 october, is 167 ARS = 1 USD, no, I don’t forgot to put 1 before the 63, you saw right, from 63 to 167 in less than one year. So we are losing purchasing power second by second… And if you want to do a fixed term deposit you will still lose purchasing power.
postscript: i love my coutry, we have lots of great thing, but the economy is not one of our things.
I would say with everything going on in the world live entertainment is a malinvestment. Due to the covid-19 pandemic almost all live entertainment has been brought to a screeching gault. With no end in sight and so much uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, I think live entertainment that involve large crowds of people will suffer.
Well let’s see. So far the paparazzi coin I’ve put some money in seems like a complete waste. They seemed like a good idea at the time… getting listed on some exchanges, coming out with an app, they had a nice pump… but since they got listed on Kucoin they just go one direction. That’s right, it’s DOWN. No activity on github, no posts on medium no nothing. Let’s think about something more world-encompassing then my sh!tcoin investment…
Well how about the semi-subsidized education system which lands most people in debt by being unreasonably expensive and having zero to do with a free market.
I would say any and all state/government run companies/institutions in Sweden. Everything whey touch is slow and expensive.
I think an example of malinvestment is the current policy in US to support coal mining for generation of electricity with disregard of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. As most of the world is heading to reduce the CO2 emissions, it makes less sense to help a dying industry instead of supporting and researching in other ways of generating electricity that has less impact on the environment.
Research an investment (could be a public company, private company, government agency, infrastructure project, etc) that you believe meets the definition of a malinvestment (past or present) and argue why you think it’s a misallocation of capital (3-5 sentences).
I believe the furlough scheme can be a form of mal-investment as some companies who are still conducting business and work at 100% could apply and receive government during this pandemic.
It has its benefits however can be easily abused and taken advantage of…
Yam was a malinvestment and a rug pull.
I would say al governments at the moment. All governments are now printing money and pumping money in companies that are sick that would normally die that’s is the way of life. You survive to live another day or you die.
Stocks are rising while the economy is going down. We live in a print bubble at the moment and our future self is going to pay the price.
Time to go fulltime Crypto 
In Philadelphia the city invested in a public solar trash compaction system called “Big Belly”. The idea behind the cans were that they were costly (in the range of 5K per can) but would be able to compact trash and recycling and would only need to be emptied 1/10th as often as other trash cans. The first issue is that there was fundamentally an issue with trash and recycling in the city in the first place and the cans, despite holding more trash still needed to be emptied just as much as regular trash cans except they are 3 times harder to empty and require special equipment to move the trash. The second issue is that the cans lacked a means of opening the trash compaction part without using your hands and ultimately the city had to invest another 2K per can to retrofit foot pedals to operate the cans hands free. Overall a huge malinvestment that returned nothing to the city or its tax payers because the proper research was not conducted prior to implementation.
Bausch Health Companies (formerly Valeant Pharmaceuticals) - you may know it from Netflix documentary. This pharmaceutical company was using money which was meant to be for R&D to acquire another pharmaceutical companies. They were focusing on companies which manufactured medications to treat rare diseases and then increased prices several x for these medications.
In 2009, the French government voted a law for a green tax. Basically, any trucks using any Freeway would have to pay a tax. To do that they had to build gates with cameras all over France. But in 2015 the government decided to reconsider because of the strikes ( are we french or not ? 
) and the backlash from carriers company.
Now we have useless gates all over France the project cost us 1 Billion EUR, we still have to remove them which gonna cost us more money and they decided to add extra taxes on diesel to cover the cost. Isnt it beautiful? 
A bad investment in Portugal after receiving EU funds was yhe built of roads that hardly have a car circulating.
Quite a famous one that has probably been said already: Theranos started by Elizabeth Holmes. Drew in a huge amount of interest when they said they could carry out blood tests with more accurate results in a fraction of the time that current methods could achieve. Turned out they couldn’t at all, and they were just making up the results for the tests that were sent to them.
I believe you could argue the C.D.C. as i do belive they have been under scrutiny by the trump administration for misappropriations of funds.
As the worlds financial infrastructure is changing/going to change, specially in the next 5-10-20 years, i belive that many companies will get rect because of malinvestments from the past, present and future.
American oil companies.
The sector has been severely effected by the 19 crisis. As the economy continues to slow production will slow causing even less need. Though this will effect the oils as a whole. The Americans have a much higher production cost and May end up in bankruptcy much faster. Combined with a strong oil sector in Russia and the Saudi regions. This could provide for even more pressure. These funds would be better spent in anti inflation assets. For the next 3 years.
I believe the Federal Reserve buying roughly 30% of all mortgages and many many bonds in order to introduce new money into the economy is a malinvestment.