Month: July 2018

The Bear’s Lair: The corporate governance model is broken

John Schnatter, founder of the solidly profitable Papa John’s (Nasdaq:PZZA) was forced out last week for using a naughty word, while Elon Musk remains CEO of the eternally loss-making Tesla (Nasdaq:TSLA) despite tweeting one. The last three decades have supposedly made massive improvements in corporate governance. Well, whatever that is, it doesn’t seem to work […]

The Bear’s Lair: Towards a better banking system

It is likely that the over-leverage of the last decade and the lack of true reform in the banking system will lead to another financial crisis, in which taxpayers will once again be strong-armed to bail out the banking system. To prevent this from happening yet again in ten years’ time, I propose a novel […]

The Bear’s Lair: Engineering must beat financial engineering

Michael J. Dell is said to be bringing Dell Computer back to the stock market, at a valuation several times that at which it went private. GE has been thrown out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index, after a sorry saga of share buybacks, financial manipulation and forced asset sales. Tesla is unable to meet […]

The Bear’s Lair: Time for Mexico to bring back Diaz

Porfirio Diaz, who had ruled Mexico with multiple re-elections almost continuously since 1876, was ousted from power in 1911. In 107 years, you would think Mexico would have found another equally competent ruler, but it hasn’t, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador seems very unlikely to break that track record of failure. Maybe it is time […]