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You Can Kick The Can Down The Road, But Reality Will Catch Up With You Eventually

October 13, 2018

You Can Kick The Can Down The Road, But Reality Will Catch Up With You Eventually

Nobody can defy the laws of economics forever.  Whether it is an individual, a company or the nation as a whole, reality always catches up with everyone eventually.  For years, I have been warning that Sears was eventually going to zero, but of course it didn’t happen immediately.  Sears CEO Eddie Lampert kept convincing investors to pour more money into his beleaguered money pit, and so the can kept getting kicked down the road.  It takes a great con man to be able to pull off what Eddie Lampert was able to pull off, and we should all be in awe at the level of skill that he has displayed.  But all good cons eventually come to an end, and now the retailer that was once the largest in world history is coming to an end.  According to multiple media reports, a Sears bankruptcy filing is imminent.  For a while there it looked like it would be a Chapter 7 filing which would mean immediate liquidation for Sears.  But it appears that Lampert will be able secure enough funding to give Sears a little bit of breathing space.  A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing will allow most of the stores to stay open through the holidays and will give Sears more time to sell off more assets.

I can’t even imagine who would be dumb enough to hand Lampert more money at this point, and this is yet another example that shows that the old saying “a sucker is born every minute” is definitely true.

And we are not talking about a small amount of money.  According to USA Today, Sears is going to need between 300 and 500 million dollars just to keep operating through the holidays…

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A Bankruptcy of Nuclear Proportions

April 14, 2017

A Bankruptcy of Nuclear Proportions

With the failure of Westinghouse, the future of American nuclear power looks even bleaker. (JEFF FUSCO/Getty Images)

Summary

In any given year, a handful of companies file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Rarely, however, does one of these filings reverberate beyond the boardroom and into the realm of geopolitics. Those that do — Lehman Brothers in 2008, or several U.S. automakers in 2008-10 — usually involve hundreds of billions of dollars. But the next big geopolitically relevant bankruptcy may be on the horizon, and the amount of money involved is tiny next to the collapses of the past decade.

Analysis

On March 29, Westinghouse Electric Co., a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, filed for bankruptcy. The U.S.-based nuclear power company has been building two state-of-the-art nuclear power plants in Georgia and South Carolina, but it has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. The filing sent Toshiba scrambling to cut its losses by March 31, the end of Japan’s fiscal year. The Japanese conglomerate ended up writing down over $6 billion on its nuclear reactor business. But Toshiba’s troubles don’t end there; the firm is also working to sell off a portion of its chip manufacturing holdings.

The U.S. government is worried about what the sale of Westinghouse could mean for the future of traditional nuclear power in the United States and for nuclear power in China, which is keen to learn the secrets of a Western firm such as Westinghouse. The Japanese government, meanwhile, is wary of how Beijing could benefit in the long term, should a Chinese firm acquire Toshiba’s semiconductor unit.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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