Looking Backwards…
LB #1 The ad market is broken and it reveals insight to where the puck is going. Axios reports that in media Buzzfeed saw a 35% decline in ad revenue year over year, Dotdash Meredith down 12% and the Wall Street Journal parent down 3%. Major media networks Warner Bros., Comcast/NBC Universal, Paramount, Fox and Disney posted a 12% average decline in linear ads last quarter. These are big declines and with declines in revenue comes layoffs. Of note Vice Media laid off almost 100, the woman focused brand Jezebel laid off 23, Conde Nast laid off 270, Washington Post laid off 240, and all told in the last year 20,000 media jobs have been eliminated. The banking giant Citigroup is expected to begin layoffs as early as Monday, and Amazon has reported layoffs in its Alexa division. Having a mystery woman set a kitchen timer for you didn’t monetize? I’m shocked, Alexa. In addition, 150 Jewish leaders called for large media and digital companies to pause advertising on Elon’s Musk Twitter platform. It seems that they are doing so. He seems to be antagonizing Jews over his comments concerning the conflict in Gaza. He spent $44 billion on that company just over a year ago and has been losing advertisers ever since.
LB#2
More from the madness of our blossoming new industry, EV. A 100% electric bus lost power, rolled downhill, and smashed into 9 cars on a San Francisco street last week. The chaos from San Francisco is just overwhelming right now. Chairman Xi was in town this week and they had barricades and they moved all of the homeless out. Leave it to a communist to get the job done that Democrats couldn’t. Democrats were too eager to suckle at the teet of the Chinese economy to let a few things like human rights get in the way. That is why they haven’t cleaned up the streets before right, human rights? I guess we now know where the line in the sand is.
Electric bus loses power in San Francisco and rolls downhill hitting 9 cars
LB#3-
Bretibart News reported that Roman Chervinsky, a colonel in Ukraine military, was the coordinator of the attack that destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline according to the Washington Post. In October of 2022, we wrote right here on this very site that the culprits of the explosion might very well be the Ukrainians because if Europe ever decided to stop supporting Ukraine while cheap Russian gas was available then it was likely lights out for Ukraine. Ukraine needed the financial and military support of the US and Europe to fight the war against the Russians. Now we have a military conflict in the Middle East and the US government is having trouble finding funds for the Ukraine or Israeli conflicts due to the chaos in Congress. Ukrainian President Zelensky denied Ukrainian involvement just as the US denied American involvement despite claims to the contrary. What seems to be certain is that no one is pointing the finger at Russia which is what everyone seemed to be doing after the attack.
Looking Forwards…
LF#1
The New York Post had an article with pictures of a CVS in Washington DC where the future and all the products are locked up and there are pictures and a call button for shoppers to push and a service attendant will come and get the items that they wish to purchase. The items for sale are locked up, but the criminals are not. This is the moral failure that is becoming prevalent in this country. Target’s CEO on a call this week said that shoppers appreciated a similar stance by his company because the items they need are able to be purchased because the stores now have inventory to sell because the inventory hasn’t been stolen. This is not an America that I find particularly appealing.
Products are locked up because criminals are not
LF#2
Fox News reports this week that people at Disney World are taking shits while in line for the Rise of the Resistance ride and leaving it. Another source claimed that this happened three times in one day on this particular ride. It happens so frequently that they called one building the “Poop Hall” because it is so frequent. They put up cameras and it still didn’t deter patrons from shitting on the floor while waiting for the ride. Shitting in public while paying incredible amounts of money at an amusement park is not amusing in the least. I think I know why the Disney stock has been falling.
I Know why Disney’s stock is down
LF#3
We wrote recently about Siemens Energy going hat in hat to the German government for a handout and it seems they got 80% from the government and another 20% in loans from banks, which I am sure weren’t coerced into doing so at all. Wink wink. Now in America we have problems of our own. Barron’s Avi Salzman writes, Arizona based TPI Composites, a wind blade manufacturer reports that it has lost $190 million in the first nine months of 2023, almost twice as much as the entire current market value of the company. They lost twice as much money as the market value of the company, how is that possible? It is due to cheap and easy financing and government grants of course. We have talked about how this is simply a governmental money transfer from the pockets of the taxpayers to these companies that have a broken business model. Their stock which traded at $70 in 2021 is now trading at $2.56. Welcome to EV finance people. Invest accordingly. Money isn’t free and it should never have been. Why is TPI so important? It is the only independent blade manufacturer outside of China and their blades account for 38% of wind capacity outside China last year. Their cash flow prospects appear bleak as they are trying to raise or restructure some of their financing. Lack of cash is the business killer and unprofitable EV businesses are no different. This one seemingly has a monopoly on wind turbine blade manufacturing and they are still losing money at an unbelievable rate.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.