Elon Musk has personified the hopes and dreams of this bull market; Tesla burnishes its results through aggressive accounting; its a culture of deception because it is selling self-driving, which doesnt yet exist. Jim Chanos from We Are In The Golden Age Of Fraud (Financial Times)
Jim Chanos is perhaps the most well-known remaining short-seller in this market. Dont be fooled by his demure characterization of Elon Musk and Tesla. Its calculated diplomacy. The numbers are far more than just polished up to look good the accounting is not just aggressive, its fraudulent, and Chanos knows that as well as anyone.
Chanos describes the current environment as a really fertile field for people to play fast and loose with the truth, and for corporate wrongdoers to get away with it for a long time. He reels off why: a 10-year bull market driven by central bank intervention; a level of retail participation in the markets reminiscent of the end of the dotcom boom; Trumpian post-truth in politics, where my facts are your fake news; and Silicon Valleys fake it until you make it culture, which is compounded by Fomo the fear of missing out. All of this is exacerbated by lax oversight. Financial regulators and law enforcement, he says, are the financial archaeologists they will tell you after the company has collapsed what the problem was. (Financial Times)
I have said many times that Tesla and Elon Musk embody and reflect the extreme degree to which the U.S. system has defined deviance downward into what is now a complete Banana Republic controlled by crony-capitalist elitists who are putting the screws to the middle class. The money printed by the Fed is nothing more than the thinly veiled bailout of the biggest banks nothing more effecting the greatest wealth transfer in history.
The fraud and corruption is blatant. And theres nothing the masses can do about it at this point. The U.S. economic, financial, political and legal system is now amalgam of 1984 and Atlas Shrugged. Eventual collapse is fait accompli.
Chanos himselfburnishesthe adjectives he uses to convey the degree to which the U.S. system has been engulfed in fraud, corruption and open theft. In my opinion, Francisco DAnconia in Atlas Shrugged describes the U.S. perfectly in this excerpt from the famous Money Speech:
Watch money. Money is the barometer of a societys virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsionwhen you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothingwhen you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favorswhen you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws dont protect you against them, but protect them against youwhen you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrificeyou may know that your society is doomed.
Read more here:
We Are In The Golden Age Of Fraud - Gold Seek
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