Courtesy of Pam Martens
If Wall Street can glam up a story around a stock or a man or both, it can sell the hell out of the shares to the dumb money. If enough dumb money invests, the Dark Pools spring into action and drive the price even higher. That brings in hedge funds. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. This is how we got the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, the dot.com bust in 2000, the Enron, Worldcom and Tyco flameouts, and whatever we end up calling the bust that lies ahead of the current brainless bubble market.
Take yesterday’s market, for example. Boeing lost 2.91 percent of its value, driving the Dow lower, while Tesla gained 5.61 percent driving the Nasdaq higher.
Boeing turned 100 years old on July 15, 2016. It has a half trillion dollars in back orders. It manufactures the 737, 747, 767, 777 and 787 families of commercial airplanes which represent almost half the world fleet. The company is also a major manufacturer of freighters, reporting that “about 90 percent of the world’s cargo is carried onboard Boeing planes.”
Tesla, the electric car maker, has been around since 2003. It lost almost $2 billion last year and has never delivered an annual profit to shareholders. Somehow, it has managed to achieve a market capitalization of $58.36 billion as of yesterday’s close. (This is not to say that electric cars are not the wave of the future but only to suggest that the survival of a particular technology does not guarantee the survival of a particular company.)
Tesla’s CEO is Elon Musk. He Tweets and says crazy things in a fashion that is undignified for the head of a publicly-traded company. In that respect, he is another symptom of these aberrational times where the man holding the highest office in the land, President Donald Trump, also Tweets and says crazy things that are undignified for the head of a major nation.
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Picture of Elon Mush from a Ted Talk, here.