Courtesy of Pam Martens
New York Stock Exchange
On April 1 we wrote the following about the sorrowful state of the listing standards at the New York Stock Exchange:
“We rarely make predictions but we’re going to make one with confidence today. The New York Stock Exchange’s efforts to capture more market share of the IPO business by listing highly questionable Chinese companies and blank-check companies (SPACs) with no prior business history is going to inevitably blow up and cause long-term reputational damage to an institution that is indelibly linked to U.S. markets.”
Just 15 days later, more evidence is emerging that the New York Stock Exchange is going to experience the kind of reputational damage done to the Nasdaq stock exchange during the dot.com pump and dump era, which generated trillions of dollars in losses to investors when it blew up in 2000.
Yesterday, the hedge fund Scorpion Capital, which has a short position in shares of QuantumScape and stands to profit from its decline, released a breathtaking 188-page report in which it calls the company a “fraud,” a “scam,” an “impending pump and dump,” and wrote that it “Makes Theranos Look Like Amateurs.” (Theranos claimed it had created a technology that would revolutionize the blood-testing industry. It was eventually exposed as a fraud. Former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou wrote the seminal book on the case, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.)
QuantumScape is a much-hyped battery developer for electric vehicles. It began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on November 27 of last year. At the time, it had no commercial product and zero revenues.
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