100% serious question: Has the entire US equities market turned into a gigantic shell game where everyone is playing chicken? A scam market? Is there any oversight at all? Are there no concern for fundamentals?
I’m not blaming Trump or his clown-car cabinet for this, and they’re merely a symptom of the end-game free for all that has been happening for some time.
Just look at Tesla, a company whose revenue has started declining in an extremely competitive, low-margin industry where they’re a small potato and who are certain to keep fading away, and whose earnings are barely treading water and giving clear indicators they’re going to plummet into the red.
360 P/E. ~$1.3 trillion dollar capitalization.
Those one million robotaxies super-robots (a field in which Tesla has absolutely zero credibility, and at best has demonstrated some hilariously obvious scams) will surely save the day. Elon — Texas-man with a Canadian citizenship — can keep doing his Matryoshka doll routine where he keeps bundling his losers with his losers and then hide them in his winners, much like the subprime mortgage debacle. Surely nothing to be concerned about.
Ryan Cohen — Florida-man that holds a Canadian citizenship — CEO of failing retailer GameStop, made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay the other day.
And yes, GameStop is a failing retailer. Revenue is falling quarter after quarter despite all the grand ambitions to turn it around, and the operation is “profitable” only via-
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Selling off parts1 and constantly shrinking to only the most profitable components left
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A gigantic $9B cash reserve that it acquired by baiting a bunch of meme investors and issuing yet more shares of a failing B&M, along with issuing convertible debt backed by that massive cash reserve from meme-investors.
GameStop has a market cap of less than $11B, while it holds >$9B in cash and cash equivalents. It’s basically a t-bill with a guy who makes memelord statements to the press occasionally. He keeps successfully raising money somehow for this failing brick and mortar, because that’s where the US is at now.
Anyway, CNBC tried to make sense of his crazy bid and the interview was an enormous red flag. Cohen later went on Fox — a disinformation shithole that has absolutely no qualms spouting horseshit 24/7 — and he and the host yucked it up.
There is a certain irony that TD Bank — you know, the Canadian bank, named after the city of Toronto and the Dominion of Canada — is who this guy leaned to as the financier of his ebay bid. What in the world is TD doing getting involved with nonsense like this? If that guy believed the shit he serves up for his followers, he’d engage with a big, strong, capitalist American bank. They’d probably have tears in their eyes telling him how great he is.
Seriously though, it’s pretty tough to call what is happening in the US today “capitalism”. It’s just a bizarre shell/confidence game at this point. This sort of nonsense always happened among penny stocks and spam-email blasts/boiler rooms, but now it is mainstream and normalized.