Tag: news

Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

The greatest wealth transfer in history has already begun and the next crisis will only accelerate the process.

As the printing presses continue cranking out more and more money, looking forward to a time when the markets pause or another economic crisis consumes the world is an issue we all should think about. How much wealth will escape the next large financial reset is very important because it will set the bar that determines the rate of inflation or deflation in coming years. If you believe we did not solve many of our financial problems after 2008 but merely masked them with a huge amount of newly printed money you are likely to embrace this concept.

The Shell Game Of Wealth Transfer

Much like a shell game where wealth is transferred about, in our modern society wealth is always on the move. Wealth and how things are valued is far from constant, it is fungible and constantly changing. While we may try to deny it, wealth is in a constant state of flux and constantly moving. Wealth comes in many forms, it can be held in the form of paper, promises, or as something more tangible and real such as property or goods.

Some items such as a tool hold “utility value” and its value may be based on how much work it can perform or the revenue it can produce. Replacement cost, supply and demand, and factors such as whether something can spoil or might grow obsolete over time also help determine its value as a place wealth can be safely stored. The term, safely stored in this case also includes placing it out of the reach of governments’ ability to tax it or make it illegal to own.

Defining wealth is one thing but it is important to actually delve into its nature to truly understand just how elusive it can be. Wealth is defined as the abundance of valuable resources or valuable material possessions. An individual, community, region, or country that possesses an abundance of such possessions or resources to the benefit of the common good is known as wealthy. This means it might be preferable to live as a poor person in a very rich and wealthy society versus a rich person in a poor and wretched place. This notion underlines the idea wealth is also relevant and measured by how it compares to that of others.

Don’t Be Naive, They Do Not Care

Returning to the subject of various kinds of wealth, today Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies and other “digital assets” designed to work as a medium of exchange also fall into the category of wealth. They have joined pensions, annuities, and even investments in stocks and such as a store of wealth. Many assets fall into the area of paper promises that are often recorded somewhere far from sight or as a digital entry on a computer. These intangible stores of wealth based on faith have grown at a massive rate during the last several decades and were relatively minor players until recently. Currencies, also known as fiat money, are also just IOUs or paper promises. The idea of a currency free-society in my mind tends to break the bonds that link us to wealth but that is for another post.

In the past I have written several pieces about subjects such as, writing off the rising amount of bad debt, how debt is like a mirage moving into the distance, how bad debt is resolved, and how precarious the vessels where we store our wealth can be, however, the crux of this article centers around what will or might be left after stress or war pushes the global economy to the brink or into total collapse. A great deal will depend on how such an event unfolds, this means what kind or type of value and wealth is the first to vanish.

Be Skeptical, Be Cautious, Get Smart!

I will be the first to admit the answer is unknown, still in this “exercise of the mind,” I am asking you to consider and think about such a scenario. The ugly truth is that there are many places your wealth could vanish into and multitudes of ways it could seep away. Remember, wealth zips across borders at the click of a button and just because you deposit it with a local institution does not mean it stays in your community.

We witnessed how wealth could be “transferred away” decades ago during the savings and loan crisis when huge beautiful buildings were constructed in certain areas from wealth transferred in from other parts of the country. Needless to say when the dust settled the big winners were the areas with the new buildings and not those forced to pay for them when the loans used to build them went into default.

Today some market watchers claim that the stock market is being held at lofty levels while the smart money is rushing to the exits. Today tens of trillions of dollars are sitting in offshore banking accounts in places such as the Cayman Islands. Today government and businesses are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars each year by issuing bonds some that will not return investor’s money for decades. Today homes, apartments, and buildings are being built, some poorly constructed, with loans guaranteed more or less by the American people. Today America’s national debt stands at over 28 trillion dollars and is rising. Today currencies such as the euro and yen are even more fundamentally flawed than the dollar. I could do this a bit longer but I suspect I’ve made the point.

We have all heard about how the Caymans have become a popular tax haven among the American elite and large multinational corporations. This is because there is no corporate or income tax on money earned outside of its territory. This has made the Caymans especially popular among hedge fund managers. I hate to blow a hole in the idea that you can safely tuck their money away in an offshore banking account, the reality is, we have no idea where all the money deposited in the Cayman Islands really is. Banks do not just sit on deposits and keep them safe, they loan them out.

We must never forget the world is full of crooks, evil politicians, greedy bankers, and that we have judicial systems that make true justice a rare commodity. Returning to the focus of this article, the thing that is important is what or how much wealth survives an economic crisis and in what form. That is because when that wealth comes out of hibernation it will soak up all the tangible assets on the planet. This will be the determining factor of whether we face inflation, deflation, or some crazy mix of the two. Remember it is the nature of those in charge to throw the masses under the bus when things go sideways.

The average person is foolish and silly if they expect to be protected when the next financial crisis hits. Those counting on a stimulus check for survival will someday most likely find it will not buy them diddly-squat. The shelves will be empty or the value of what they receive will simply not be enough. The economic landscape we face following such an event will without a doubt be shaped and depend on what wealth survives and how much vanishes following a tsunami of defaults and /or a monetization of debt where government debt disappears and inflation takes its place. A word to the wise should be sufficient and cause any person prudent or interested in protecting their wealth to consider the many ways wealth can vanish and that it can without a doubt happen to you.

The authors of a Bloomberg report claiming the trend of financial services firms moving from New York to Florida was rapidly starting to reverse couldn’t have been more wrong. Barely two weeks after the New York State legislature passed a state budget that saddled the wealthiest New Yorkers with an effective tax rate north of 50%, the highest in the nation…

…more financial firms and their wealthiest employees are bidding the Big Apple adieu. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd was preparing to move to Miami as the firm moves to dedicate more resources to South Florida.

And now, Bloomberg has followed that earlier report up with another high-profile departure: Apollo Global Management, newly free of its founder Leon Black, was considering opening additional offices in South Florida, specifically in Miami and West Palm Beach, as well as elsewhere in the US and Europe. The decision to “expand” its physical presence its the result of a survey of employees about where they would prefer to work as part of a strategy to attract a broader talent pool, a spokesperson for the firm told Bloomberg.

Apollo, which has 1,729 employees worldwide, is just the latest financial services firm to commit to a more open ended “open working” plan as workers in the US start their journey back to the office. This contrasts with Goldman and JPM, which are already summoning front-office workers and analysts back to the office (now that we all know how Goldman CEO David Solomon feels about working from home).

As far as moving to Florida, Goldman is reportedly polling employees to figure out which workers in various front-office investment-banking and capital markets positions might be willing to relocate to Miami.

Hedge fund titan Steven Cohen is reportedly looking to move his new firm, Point72 Asset Management, to Florida despite his recent purchase of the New York Mets (he also recently took a massive hit on the sale of a New York condo). Elliott Management, and even the mighty Citadel, are looking to Florida as well.

While Apollo said it has no plans to pull back from New York, even Bloomberg acknowledged that the newfound flexibility brought on by remote work is making low-tax locales like Florida and Texas more appealing. Under the new $212 billion state budget, the top tax rate on wealthy Americans would temporarily increase to 9.65% from 8.82% for single filers earning more than $1.1 million. Income between $5 million and $25 million would be taxed at 10.3% and for more than $25 million it would be 10.9%. The new rates would expire in 2027. And with New York City residents also paying city taxes, the combined top rate for the highest earners would be between 13.5% and 14.8%, surpassing the 13.3% rate in California, currently the highest in the nation, as we reported previously.

Lump in Federal Taxes and the increases would mean that the richest New Yorkers would be hit with a combined marginal rate of 51.8% — higher than levels in some European countries.

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

For three days, I’ve had sitting on my virtual spindle a post that Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, posted on her Substack page.  It’s entitled “I Refuse to Stand by while My Students Are Indoctrinated.”  

The author isn’t Weiss but is, instead, Paul Rossi, a math teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $57,330).  

On Friday, Weiss added another open letter, this from Andrew Gutmann, a parent who had just pulled his daughter out of Brearley, another expensive private school (annual tuition: $54,000).  

Both are horrifying exposés of, and attacks against, the woke culture saturating these institutions.

Both letters are long and don’t yield easily to a brief summary.  I’ll quote a few select paragraphs from each, but you must read them to get the full flavor of the Maoist madness at these institutions.

Paul Rossi, the teacher, writes that Grace Church is focused on “‘antiracism’ training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to [my students] and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding.”

Rossi perfectly describes the self-hatred, mental repression, cognitive dissonance, and pure racism this training inculcates into young minds:

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

Rossi describes how, during a segregated “whites only” student and faculty Zoom meeting, he spoke out, inspiring the students to speak out, too.  This was a bad thing.

I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.” 

He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.

Rossi was then denounced over the school announcement system.  There’s more.  Read it all, because it’s important.

The letter that Andrew Gutmann sent to fellow parents after he pulled his daughter out of Brearley is, if anything, even more horrifying:

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob.

To give context to his scathing attack on the school, Gutmann describes actual systemic racism as things such as the real Jim Crow, Jewish genocide, and the Democrats’ decision in 1942 to lock up all their Japanese-American citizens.  And then he’s off:

I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression.

…

I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites.

…

I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna.

…

I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.”

…

l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests. 

As with Rossi’s letter, there’s more, much more, including all the material I snipped out.  And as with Rossi’s letter, you must read the whole thing.

A couple of years ago, ensconced in a Senate chamber in which almost half of the senators and all the national media agreed with him, and lying about violating Senate rules, Sen. Cory Booker made the ridiculous claim that he was having his “I am Spartacus moment.”

In fact, what we’re seeing from Rossi and Gutmann, in the belly of the beast that is true-blue New York, should be the start of a true Spartacus moment.  We must join together to defeat the racist Critical Race Theory and other maddened toxins oozing from leftists.

While CNN may no longer be torturing people in airports, voluntary viewership has fallen over 50% in multiple categories since President Biden took office, according to Fox News.

Who knew that their best move during the 2020 election would have been to help Trump win, instead of helping Biden.

In the first three weeks of 2021, the network averaged 2.2 million viewers – only to plummet to just one million viewers – a decline of 54%. Among the key advertising demographic of adults age 25-54, ratings are down 60%. From December 28 through Inauguration day, viewership went from 617,000 viewers in that demographic to just 244,000 since Biden took office.

CNN’s liberal primetime hosts Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon haven’t been able to keep their audiences under the new administration, either.

CNN averaged 3.1 million viewers from 8-11 p.m. from Dec. 28 through Inauguration Day but only 1.4 million since for a whopping 55-percent decline. Over the same time period, CNN’s primetime lineup lost 63 percent of its viewers among the crucial demo. –Fox News

CNN also fared worse than liberal competitor MSNBC, which lost ‘only’ 34% of its total-day viewers, and 30% of primetime viewers under Biden. Fox News points out, of course, that their viewership has remained mostly flat – as declines remained in the single digits.

When asked if he was worried about the ratings disaster, CNN host Don Lemon told the New York Times’ podcaster “Sway”:

“No. I’m not worried about it … Trump was a horrible person. And he was terrible for the country. And it is better for all — for the world that he is no longer the President of the United States,” adding “So if that means that cable news ratings go down? Aww. So I’m not really that concerned about it. I would prefer that my ratings go down and Trump not be in office than my ratings be sky-high and him be there. That’s the honest truth.”

And when a CNN anchor ends anything with “That’s the honest truth,” it’s exactly the opposite.

CNN the new clown news network! pic.twitter.com/zVvh3KB2Ja

— LeAnn F Sellers 🇺🇸❣🇺🇸 (@LeAnnFSellers1) April 15, 2021

On Friday White House press secretary Jen Psaki was pressed on why President Biden appeared to initiate a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, yet without setting conditions, which is widely being viewed as a “weakness”. This is also given as we and many others have pointed out that it effectively cuts out Kiev, leaving Ukraine’s fate to be considered by the two superpowers at the table. For Putin, it appears that “saber-rattling” over Ukraine in the form of the troop build-up in Crimea and along the border has forced Biden’s hand, effectively making Washington have to deal directly with Putin, precisely what the Kremlin has wanted all along.

She was asked at the daily briefing by a reporter: “Why would you announce a summit intention without a commitment? … A high-level meeting of this sort is often a point of leverage with the world leader… why aren’t there conditions?” Psaki fumbled through a response while avoiding the question head-on…

Psaki then rambled on about “consequences”…

Biden was ”clear that there would be consequences for the actions, whether it was the hacking of SolarWinds or other problematic behavior by Russian leadership,” Psaki said in reference to Thursday’s Russia sanctions rollout.

”And the president offered that … to send the message that we will have disagreement, we’re not going to hold back on that. But our objective is to have a predictable and stable relationship,” she added.

In follow-up to her apparent avoidance of the main issue the reporter mused that if Putin actually rejects the summit offer, ”wouldn’t that indicated some weakness on the part of the American administration here?”

”I think the president’s view is that Russia is on the outside of the global community in many respects at this point in time,” Psaki replied.

So again she didn’t actually answer the question.

“It’s the G7, not the G8 … We’ve put sanctions in place in order to send a clear message that there should be consequences for the actions. The Europeans have also done that. What the president is offering is a bridge back. And so certainly he believes it’s in their interest to take him up on that offer.”

How Putin’s “Saber-Rattling” Forced A Biden Summit, Bypassing Kiev To Decide Ukraine’s Fate https://t.co/95A4thiMNU

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 17, 2021

To review, here’s what FT had to say

Here’s more from FT on the whole question:

If Vladimir Putin’s decision to deploy tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine’s border in the past few weeks was driven primarily by a desire to get the west’s attention, he did not have to wait too long for his reward.

Hours after his defense minister on Tuesday admitted Russia had mobilised two armies and three paratroop divisions to positions close to the conflict-wracked frontier, US President Joe Biden phoned the Kremlin with an offer of a bilateral summit: a long sought-after prize for Putin who craves a seat at the world’s highest negotiating table. 

…Those 50,000 extra soldiers, scores of tanks and other heavy weaponry spooked Kyiv and other European powers, and sparked a hurried response from Nato and the US amid fears over a potential outbreak of fighting between the two countries. 

Consider too… what if this were Trump? 

Authored by Peter Earle via The American Institute for Economic Research,

In a market economy, consumers vote with their dollars. The survival and growth of a business depends pivotally upon how effectively they convince customers to buy their products over those of their competitors. But recently, consumers seem to expect a new product in addition to what they were already purchasing from firms: corporate consciousness. In particular, a decidedly left-leaning consciousness.   

But it’s not entirely accurate to claim that consumers have compelled businesses to “get with the times;” more precisely, the sensibilities of the public, have mostly through the media and polling, bled into corporate board rooms. Big businesses have in turn doled out value statements; some are praised, others pilloried. It’s a chicken-or-egg case: did the consumer demand woke capital, or has the corporatist, desperate to maintain market share and boost public perception of their firm, made woke capital the law of the American economy?

A New Twist on an Old Saw

In reality, woke capital is nothing new – though it has undergone many transformations and changes of name over the years. On the individual level, early industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller engaged in corporate philanthropy, donating large shares of their fortunes to charity. In the 1940s, businesses themselves started supporting charitable causes. 

The idea of corporate social responsibility entered the mainstream in the 1970s when the Committee for Economic Development pushed the “social contract” model, stating that businesses function as a result of public “consent,” thus leading to an obligation to serve societal needs. (This also ties to the rise and spread of stakeholder theories, which today no MBA program would dare omit.) That same model outlined three duties of businesses: providing jobs and economic growth, fair and honest treatment of workers and customers, and improving the conditions of the surrounding community. 

The present ascendance of woke capital, then, has been less of a rise and more of a continuation––a twist, really––on existing tendencies. The contemporary culture war has only served as a catalyst. A 2020 Spectator piece reads,

As the Democratic party and cultural elites have lurched left on cultural issues, corporate America has lurched along with them. America’s ‘reckoning with racial injustice’ in the past three months was enthusiastically endorsed by major corporations, often even as their physical outlets were plundered by the ‘mostly peaceful’ activists on the street….As capital aligns with the cultural left, it is now extracting its concessions. 

It wouldn’t be so unpalatable if it weren’t rife with hypocrisy. This, ultimately, is the cardinal sin of woke capital: lofty moral standards, selectively applied. In one of the earlier discussions of the woke capital phenomenon, which appeared in The New York Times back in 2018, columnist Ross Douthat pointed out the folly in Apple’s value statements: 

It’s worth noting, for instance, how Tim Cook’s willingness to play the social justice warrior when the target is a few random Indiana restaurants that might not want to host hypothetical same-sex weddings does not extend to reconsidering Apple’s relationship with the many countries around the world where human rights are rather more in jeopardy than they are in the American Midwest.

Douthat’s concerns proved prescient as the turmoil of last summer––largely centered on the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests––came to a head. In 2020, no less than two-thirds of S&P 500 companies released statements of solidarity with the movement; a smaller share, 36 percent, contributed funds to racial justice organizations. 

S&P 500 ESG Index (5 yrs)

(Source: Bloomberg Finance, LP)

Nike and The Washington Post, among other employers, gave workers Juneteenth off as a paid holiday. Companies participated in #BlackOutTuesday, posting just a black square to their social media accounts. Managers assigned left-wing political texts to employees. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon dropped by a Chase branch to take a knee with staff in support of racial justice protests (and, it seems, could not resist taking advantage of the photo opportunity). 

The immediate aftermath of these actions was characterized by confusion and skepticism alike. Black employees of many companies that had sprung into activist action found the messaging inconsistent with their personal experiences, speaking to poor racial climates and difficulty in climbing the career ladder. Nearly one year later, investor groups are still pressuring banks and industry giants to support shareholder resolutions that will hold them to proof of progress measures. Though Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) disagrees with the premise of “woke capital,” it nonetheless concedes that “many corporate overtures to diversity, racial justice and progress are marketing gimmicks that don’t actually address structural economic inequality, and, at worst, are meant to distract from any kind of class reckoning.” 

Stunts and Missteps

One such blunder came in the form of the McCann ad agency’s Black Lives Matter blunder. In early June, the firm asked artist Shantell Martin to paint a BLM mural on the storefront of McCann’s client Microsoft. The email specifically requested that Martin finish the piece within a few days, “while the protests are still relevant.” Martin teamed up with other black artists who had been approached by McCann, eviscerating the agency in a letter that decried the disingenuity of activism with an expiration date. 

With all that in mind, it must be said that not every business simply postures for the sake of posturing. In the early days of corporate social responsibility, Milton Hershey of The Hershey Company built far more than just production facilities in Hershey, Pennsylvania; he built civic centers and cultural institutions that continue to support the community to this day. And in the woke capital era, plenty of organizations have taken up the helm of well-intentioned, effective societal change. Chobani, a leading Greek yogurt brand, has made tangible steps toward social responsibility––from actively seeking to hire refugees to investing in social entrepreneurs in order to encourage innovating for the greater good, Chobani’s impact statements are far more than just platitudes. 

Yet these examples are, in many ways, the exceptions rather than the rule. Far-reaching social and political turmoil has prompted businesses to feel as though they must comment on current issues, but that talk has hardly translated into any meaningful change. Social change is expensive––and woke capital is difficult to back––and as such, few businesses have put their money where their mouth is. That voluntary, cooperative commercial engagement is a center of gravity for civilization itself has not occurred to them, or doesn’t make for a flashy enough campaign.

SunSuper Socially Conscious Balanced Fund (AU)

(Source: Bloomberg Finance, LP)

Economic Calculation with Woke Capital

An issue with decidedly larger implications is whether or to what extent corporate management decisions made along political lines will impact potential uses of capital. Ludwig von Mises, in his writings about economic calculation, noted that private property in the means of production, and subsequently money prices established for those capital goods, 

provide…a guide amid the bewildering throng of economic possibilities. [They] enable us to extend judgement of value which apply directly only to consumption goods––or at best to production goods of the lowest order––to all goods of higher orders. Without it, all production by lengthy and roundabout processes would be so many steps in the dark. 

A large number of economically significant firms deciding to sell important assets, engage in select transactions, or limit their investments exclusively to projects managed by and firms owned by minority citizens or women may seem innocuous. And in some cases, it likely is. But to the extent that such transactions are appreciable and done in ways which preempt or confound market processes (which is to say, if they are done at prices which do not reflect the actual subjective valuation of market participants at a point in time) they will likely result in less rational allocations and overall losses of efficiency in the economy at large. 

Fad or Principle?

Though consumers seem on balance to prefer activist firms, companies largely miss the mark. A 2018 survey covering 35 countries showed that 64 percent of consumers would gladly reward firms engaged in activism of some type––proving that corporate consciousness has become an essential part of many companies’ bottom lines. However, a 2020 opinion poll conducted by Gallup in the United States indicated that public confidence in big business was laughably low. Only 19 percent of respondents reported having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in large firms. Sentiments have been tepid for decades now, with confidence lingering around the 20 percent mark since the early 2000s. And the leftward shift of business has especially alienated Republicans, with their satisfaction with big business falling to 31 percent––a 26-point decline since 2020.

Whether corporate America’s commitment to woke capital will last remains to be seen, but one questions who truly prefers this state of affairs. Companies feel obligated to offer value statements to their customers, despite often having records of conduct contrary to the socially acceptable view; consumers sense the game being played and accordingly, chafe. Structural changes, most of which involve more opportunities and less state interference, are desirable and attainable, and the lack of genuineness here suggests unsustainability. Rather than a sign of the times, the embracing of woke capital may simply come to be a relic of the times.

You won’t find Roaring Kitty Capital, LP in any Goldman Sachs salestrader’s rolodex but to the millions of WallStreetBets daytrading fanatics, the name Roaring Kitty is far more popular than Bridgewater, Citadel, or Millennium.

And for good reason: Keith Gill, the person behind the moniker “Roaring Kitty” and “DeepFuckingValue“, who launched a historic short squeeze across multiple asset classes in January, destroying Melvin Capital (which needed a bailout from both Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen) and several other heavily bearish hedge funds, showed ordinary investors that virtually anyone can become a millionaire with lots of hard work and preparation… before eventually ending up in Congress explaining to Maxine Waters just how a relative nobody managed to outsmart people who run billions thanks to his now iconic investment in Gamestop.

Another reason why “Roaring Kitty” has earned the respect of his peers is that unlike so many traders who make a buck on a trade and move on, Gill has demonstrated true diamond hands, and not only that but he is now literally doubling down on the company that brought him stardom and riches by exercising his call options and buying even more shares.

“DeepFuckingValue” posted a screenshot of his portfolio showing that he has exercised 500 GameStop call options expiring Friday at a strike price of $12, giving him 50,000 more shares of a stock that closed at $154.69 on Friday, but will likely blast off on Monday once the Reddit animal spirits are reignited.

There’s more: in addition to exercising his options, Gill also bought another 50,000 shares of the video-game retailer, doubling his holdings to 200,000 shares from 100,000 at the beginning of the month. His total investment in GameStop is now worth more than $30 million, giving him a profit of nearly $20 million. Bloomberg reached out to Gill’s mother, Elaine Gill at his childhood home in Massachusetts, who confirmed the Reddit screenshots were posted by her son.

Despite having earned the praise and admiration of most of his peers for executing what many have said has been the most astute short squeeze since Volkswagen, there were haters too and roughly around the time Gill was explaining to Maxine Waters how investing works, he was hit with a lawsuit that accused him of misrepresenting himself as an amateur investor. The suit alleged that he was actually a licensed securities professional who manipulated the market for profit, which he denied.

To be sure, it wasn’t just Gill: some argue that the true mastermind behind the Gamestop squeeze was not Roaring Kitty at all but hedge fund Senvest which started buying GME shares all the way back in September – roughly around the time the post “The REAL Greatest Short Burn of the Century” appeared on Reddit and which made over $700 million on its GME position which has given it the top position in the HSBC hedge fund ranking for the third month in a row

Meanwhile, on Friday GameStop CEO George Sherman who is expected to leave, sold almost $12 million in shares. The company is looking for a new CEO as part of a shake-up spurred by activist investor and Chewy.com co-founder Ryan Cohen, Bloomberg notes.

While shares of GameStop are up 721% YTD, though they are less than half of the peak level in January. However, now that Roaring Kitty has shown his Reddit peers that he is not only in it for the long run but doubling down, expect another squeeze on Monday as the latest generation of shorts which have entered the stock in recent weeks, is steamrolled, and as Reddit excitement in GME which had fizzled in recent weeks…

… explodes afresh.

And speaking of Chewy, we remind readers that the reason why the stock rose as high as the mid-$400s in February is not only the presence of Chewy founder Ryan Cohen, but that as the September Reddit write up noted, “if GME was trading at the same P/S multiple as $CHWY, the share price would be $420.”

In short, GME may be about to double all over again.

Which begs another question: is the daytrading, gamma-squeeze mania that shook markets in late January, about to send GME – and the whole batch of most shorted names – soaring higher all over again?

Just as Morgan Stanely released a new Autos & Shared Mobility research report a couple of months ago explaining how Tesla is losing market share to the Ford Mustang Mach-E. It appears Ford has run into a significant software hiccup for some of its Mach-Es, transforming them into “electric bricks.” 

Some Mach-E owners reported the 12-volt battery inside their vehicle has discharged after charging the main battery pack, preventing the car from turning on, essentially transforming it into an electric brick.  

According to a new service bulletin posted by the Michigan automaker on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) website, Ford has addressed the problem.

“Some 2021 Mustang Mach-E vehicles built on or before 3-Feb-2021 may exhibit the 12-volt battery becoming discharged while the vehicle is plugged in during the high voltage charging process. This may be due to the parameters in the powertrain control module (PCM). To correct the condition, follow the Service Procedure to reprogram various modules starting with the PCM,” the bulletin read. 

Here is the complete technical service bulletin:

The dying 12-volt batteries were first reported by The Verge, as furious Ford owners recently began populating on online forums about the issue. Some readers must be asking: Why do electric cars have separate 12-volt batteries from the main battery pack? 

The answer is simple: 

The battery that supplies power to the electric motors is extremely high voltage, and the 12-volt battery powers the vehicle’s low-voltage parts. When the 12-volt battery discharges, the car can’t be started.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Ford said owners must bring their Mach-Es to a dealer for the fix. So there are no over-the-air updates like a Tesla. 

“We are aware that a small number of Mustang Mach-E owners have had their 12V battery reach a low voltage condition. We proactively worked with early owners experiencing this issue to identify the root cause and a fix. In the rare instances where this still occurs, customers can now contact their local EV-certified Ford dealer to have the matter resolved.”

Ford revealed to The Verge the problem would be fixable via wireless update “later this year.” The automaker also said Mach-Es after Feb. 3 do not exhibit this problem. 

Ford wouldn’t specify how many of its Mach-Es are affected by the software glitch, but nearly 7,000 have been delivered in the first three months of the year. 

With Ford quickly selling Mach-E’s, the software glitch comes at an inopportune time as it battles Tesla for EV US market share.