Last Bear Standing

‘Behind every great fortune is a crime,’ wrote Balzac. On January 29, 2018, YouTube watchers were seeing one.

Down the highway rolled a sleek 18-wheeler,a heavy truck that promised not to destroy the planet. It was the creation of Trevor Milton and his hot-shot company, Nikola.

Trouble was, the video was a fake. The motive force was gravity, not Nikola’s advanced technology. The truck wasn’t running on its own power; it had none. It was just coasting down the hill.

For a while, the stock boomed. It rose to over $2,000 a share in June, 2020. Milton was a billionaire. But it now trades around $1.

A lot happened between $2,000 and $1. Among them, Trevor Milton got a four-year prison sentence.

MarketRealist.com:

A video purportedly showing a zero-emission truck in motion turned out to be fake and a court later found the ex-founder and chairman of Nikola Corporation guilty of defrauding investors by misleading them about the company’s technological capabilities to artificially inflate its stock price. Milton was convicted of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. The judge sentenced him to four years in prison along with a fine of $1 million.

According to Wall Street lore, a bull market will continue “until the last bear gives up.”

In 2023, famous bear short-seller Jim Chanos gave up. The Financial Times reported:

One of Wall Street’s best-known bears, Jim Chanos, has told his backers he is closing his main short-focused hedge funds after more than three decades. Chanos is best-known for his bet against Enron, the energy trader that collapsed in 2001… In a letter to investors seen by the Financial Times, Chanos wrote: “It is no secret that the long/short equity business model has come under pressure and interest in fundamental stock pickers has waned.”

Waned?!

Investors not interested in fundamental research?

Why bother with real research when you can get 25% (the S&P gain, 2024) for not doing it? Nvidia rose 171% last year, while the S&P 500 itself was up 25%. Fundamental research would have steered you away from both. In terms of value, neither looked like a good deal.

And this week, Hindenburg Research — which had revealed the fraud at Nikola — has thrown in the towel too. Reuters:

Hindenburg Research’s founder said he would disband the firm whose reports sparked heavy selling by investors and investigations by authorities, wiping billions from the market values of companies including India’s Adani Group and U.S.-based Nikola.

In a normal stock market, some companies do well; their stocks go up. Some don’t do so well; their stocks go down. Researchers try to figure out — in advance — which are which. Good research pays off.

But a normal stock market is fairly stable. As one company earns more, it takes sales from another company, which earns less. As one company cuts costs, it cuts income to other companies. Overall, the stock market doesn’t rise, or fall, very much. Because total purchasing power rises slowly, with GDP… at only around 3% per year. A stock market surge of 25% is unnatural, implausible… and suspect.

But a stock market juiced by the Fed… by hype… by hope… and tech ‘aspirations’… is a whole different thing. Real investors disappear; in come the clowns and gamblers.

How else to explain Fartcoin? The cryptocurrency made its debut in October. By December it had a value of $1.2 billion,which is a lot of pay for something of no known utility. But it was a perfect meme investment,created anonymously and said to have something to do with Elon Musk’s interest in the sounds of flatulence.

No use trying to do research on that one. There is nothing to research — no earnings, no profits, no business, no assets, no balance sheet, no audited financial reports, no CEO or parking lot attendant… no hush money… no lobbying expenses… no hanky panky in the office, no executive travel… no company logo. No nothing. Even gravity seems to be missing.

Maybe Hindenburg was the ‘last bear.’ Maybe not. But when Ursa Ultima finally gives up, we predict, the need for sharp pencils, green eye-shades, sober judgement and a gimlet glance will soon come back into fashion.

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research

~~ Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research

‘Behind every great fortune is a crime,’ wrote Balzac. On January 29, 2018, YouTube watchers were seeing one.

Down the highway rolled a sleek 18-wheeler,a heavy truck that promised not to destroy the planet. It was the creation of Trevor Milton and his hot-shot company, Nikola.

Trouble was, the video was a fake. The motive force was gravity, not Nikola’s advanced technology. The truck wasn’t running on its own power; it had none. It was just coasting down the hill.

For a while, the stock boomed. It rose to over $2,000 a share in June, 2020. Milton was a billionaire. But it now trades around $1.

A lot happened between $2,000 and $1. Among them, Trevor Milton got a four-year prison sentence.

MarketRealist.com:

A video purportedly showing a zero-emission truck in motion turned out to be fake and a court later found the ex-founder and chairman of Nikola Corporation guilty of defrauding investors by misleading them about the company’s technological capabilities to artificially inflate its stock price. Milton was convicted of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. The judge sentenced him to four years in prison along with a fine of $1 million.

According to Wall Street lore, a bull market will continue “until the last bear gives up.”

In 2023, famous bear short-seller Jim Chanos gave up. The Financial Times reported:

One of Wall Street’s best-known bears, Jim Chanos, has told his backers he is closing his main short-focused hedge funds after more than three decades. Chanos is best-known for his bet against Enron, the energy trader that collapsed in 2001… In a letter to investors seen by the Financial Times, Chanos wrote: “It is no secret that the long/short equity business model has come under pressure and interest in fundamental stock pickers has waned.”

Waned?!

Investors not interested in fundamental research?

And this week, Hindenburg Research — which had revealed the fraud at Nikola — has thrown in the towel too. Reuters:

Hindenburg Research’s founder said he would disband the firm whose reports sparked heavy selling by investors and investigations by authorities, wiping billions from the market values of companies including India’s Adani Group and U.S.-based Nikola.

But a stock market juiced by the Fed… by hype… by hope… and tech ‘aspirations’… is a whole different thing. Real investors disappear; in come the clowns and gamblers.

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research

But Green is describing more than just a new calculation. He’s talking about a new form of misery.’ It’s a poverty where you may still have most of the accoutrements of middle-class life. But your relationship with the financial elite has changed: you are indentured to the credit industry — for life.

Historically, when the Fed has cut into inflation above 3%, one of two outcomes tends to follow:

A brief reprieve, followed by a larger inflation wave (see: 1970s).

A crisis born from cheap money rather than expensive money (see: housing in the 2000s).

We are heading into another round of cuts with:

• A still-bloated balance sheet

• A new digital plumbing that auto-funds the Treasury

• Hard-asset markets flashing warning lights

Paul Tudor Jones summed it up in one dry quip: interest expense is now one of Washington’s largest bills; commodities are “ridiculously under-owned”; and “all roads lead to inflation.”

The Fed’s flip from QT to easing doesn’t end this inflation episode. It likely begins its next season.

The question investors should ask themselves isn’t whether this trend is sustainable – it isn’t.

Instead, they should ask if the $2 trillion increase in Google’s market cap has sucked capital away from other promising parts of the market – and if so, where investors can expect a rally when Google reverses.

Long have we dwelt on the corrupting influence of funny money on capital asset prices and on the economy. Everything gets distorted, perverse…and false. We get high prices. We get low prices. What we don’t get are honest prices.

Yesterday, we looked at the ‘small time crooks’ — ripping off the public for a million or two.

Today, we move to the big fry.

You’ll recall that the money in question was never earned by anyone. No one has a genuine claim to it. And what kind of apple falls from this funny money tree? Just what you’d expect…a funny one…with the worms already in it.