Saturday, July 2, 2011

A sign of the times: LNKD

LinkedIn Corporation went public right into the end of the Bernanke QE2 stimulus.  Nice timing if you ask me.  The current market cap for this "asset" is nearly 9 billion dollars.  Who in their right mind is buying this stock? The fundamentals on this equity are those of a penny stock, not an 9 billion dollar behemoth.  The price to earnings ratio is as bad or worse than the worst offenders during dot bomb but this is what our government and our illegal Federal Reserve are doing to us.  Why "us"??  Well, we will never really know for sure who is the patsy here because there is not one institutional holder listed.  How exactly does something get a 9 billion dollar market cap without any institutional holders?  Maybe from day traders?  Yeah, right.  Believe what you want but something is not right about this and it will eventually go the same way all the dot bomb high flyers went.  Unfortunately, I believe that many institutions are indeed taking stakes in these bubbles simply because the con men running them have contractually promised the suckers invested in their funds returns of 8% or more when fixed income and stock markets are yielding far less and will likely continue to yield far less for a decade or more according to Mish.  That means everyone managing these funds has to be a gambler at some level.   If I am wrong about this then what does CALPERS need with a "Chief Risk Officer"?  Sounds to me like a better job title for this guy would have been Chief Ripoff Agent of Pensioners.  If I were a con man running the show then I would probably hire a chief risk officer only at a time when I was worried about the risks I was taking with my fund OR about the long term risks I had already signed up for.  In other words, I would try to hire an "expert" through whom I could distance myself from problems and who could serve as the fall guy during the final collapse.

Unfortunately these money managers are not gambling with their money, they are gambling with yours.  If you are owed a pension or own an annuity or any other Ponzi Promise then know this: the scammers running those funds have 2 choices right now: come clean that they have made unkeepable promises to you and default in a public way OR just keep on dancing while the music is playing.  If they come clean it will be clear that they knew where all this was going years ago but said nothing.  It will also be clear that they have been operating outside of their charters in order to appear as if they could actually keep their unkeepable promises.  They will be run out of their cushy, overpaid jobs at best, and hit with civil and criminal charges at worst.  Dictators never give up easily because as soon as they do the people begin calling them war criminals and thieves.  Why do you think they don't just leave when the people demand that they do so?  It's because they know that once they are out of power they will be held accountable in ways that could never happen while they controlled the shots, the media and the fates of dissenters. 

Big money managers are financial dictators.  They have your money captive and they are not letting it go.  They have the government enforcing their control over your money with laws that disallow you access to your savings until you meet constantly increasing age targets for retirement. They operate behind closed doors with only fake transparency.  What was supposed to be safe and sane will eventually be exposed to be a house of cards as unforeseen losses make them "embrace risk" in your name.  The LinkedIn IPO is just another symptom of a very sick economy.  It is a symptom of fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. Just like nobody could predict when dot bomb would collapse, I cannot say when LinkedIn and our Ponzi Economy will collapse.  All that can be said for either of them is that they eventually will do so.
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