Let’s start with this picture, taken right here in the Bay Area:
It reminded me of a story I heard when I was young. Shortly after the Apple IPO, one of the employees there bought a beautiful new Porsche and ordered up a vanity license plate that read TNX AAPL (“thanks, Apple”). Since then, it’s been an occasional custom to do the same thing with other IPOs, assuming the vanity plate is still available.
(I would also point out the license plate frame, 11-99 Foundation. For those of you who have never heard about it, this “foundation” is a charity for California highway patrolmen, and it’s assumed that by contributing, and receiving the license plate honoring your contribution, you will be overlooked by any CHP that catches you speeding. But I digress).
Anyway, the company which the owner of this car is honoring is none other than Zoom which, unlike Apple, hasn’t made millions of people rich. Instead, it made a tiny handful of people rich, and it shit right on the heads of everyone else, as the stock chart proves:
See, ever since the Federal Reserve performed its multi-trillion dollar money shot all over everyone’s faces, the temptation to punishment evildoers have been likewise doused. I miss those days, though. It has always warmed my heart to see bad guys dragged off in cuffs.
If we lived in a different era, the guy zooming around (heh) in that Lambo wouldn’t dare take it out of his garage, because he’d get his ass kicked, or at least his car keyed. Because he’s basically flaunting his wealth right in everyone’s face, and worse than that, he’s doing so with a financial instrument which has wrecked the average Ma ‘n’ Pa Kettle that bought into the goddamned thing.
I’m on a bit of a get-the-bad-guys jag right now, because I spent six hours in my car on Sunday listening to podcast after podcast of corporate scandal history. It made me convinced I was the only honest guy left in America. Hearing the details of WorldCom, Enron, Nikola, etc. made me wonder just how many other Theranos-type scams are running right this second which are being praised as successful, honorable organizations.
Warren Buffett’s oft-repeated phrase about not knowing who is missing swimming trunks until the tide goes out will be proved true once again during this bear market. I have no doubt in my mind that there are multi-hundred-billion dollar frauds happening right under our noses, and as the bear market gets deliciously worse, they’ll be exposed, one by one.
I can only hope we enter an era where a douche like the driver of the aforementioned car decides to take the Hyundai instead.
