Saylor’s Strategy $MSTR Selling Strife to Investors

Saylor's Strategy, and the trouble with Strife

Saylor's latest scheme's name, may say it all!  It's called Series A Perpetual Strife Preferred Stock!

As Alphaville says,

"Strife"? "Perpetual Strife"? Matt Levine at Bloomberg had initially suspected a typo when he read it, but 23 references in the document suggest not. Maybe it's an inside joke — the kind of thing that sounds clever at 5am at an after-party. Or perhaps it's an unwittingly honest nod to the drama surrounding the company's relentless bitcoin accumulation.

For one, it's not your typical (Micro)Strategy dilutive equity issuance; unlike the perpetual strike preferred securities ( $STRK ), it is not convertible into common stock.

So it's just strife for you!

#Venezuela's Suffering Shows Where Illiberalism Leads

An excellent piece on Venezuela by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, showing that what we are witnessing there is but a microcosm of so many of the ailments we see in so many countries' political systems / situations throughout the world today.

Long read, but worth it. 

Venezuela Is the Eerie Endgame of Modern Politics

Citizens of a once-prosperous nation live amid the havoc created by socialism, illiberal nationalism, and political polarization.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her latest book is Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.

February 27, 2020

Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos

Last month, Juan Guaidó appeared in Washington in the role of political totem. Venezuela's main opposition leader—the man who is recognized by that country's National Assembly, millions of his fellow citizens, and several dozen foreign countries as the rightful president of Venezuela—was one of the special guests at the State of the Union address. President Donald Trump welcomed Guaidó as living evidence that his own administration was "standing up for freedom in our hemisphere" and had "reversed the failed policies of the previous administration"; he called Venezuela's current leader, Nicolás Maduro, an illegitimate ruler whose "grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken." He gave no details of how that would happen. Trump, who has never been to Venezuela or shown any prior interest in it—or, for that matter, shown any interest in freedom anywhere else —presumably knows that the country matters to some voters in South Florida. To their credit, members of Congress gave a bipartisan standing ovation to Guaidó nevertheless.

Trump is not the only world leader to cite Venezuela for self-serving ends.

Regardless of what actually happens there, Venezuela—especially when it was run by Maduro's predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez—has long been a symbolic cause for the Marxist left as well. More than a decade ago, Hans Modrow, one of the last East German Communist Party leaders and now an elder statesman of the far-left Die Linke party, told me that Chávez's "Bolivarian socialism" represented his greatest hope: that Marxist ideas—which had driven East Germany into bankruptcy—might succeed, finally, in Latin America. 

Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the British Labour Party, was photographed with Chávez and has described his regime in Venezuela as an "inspiration to all of us fighting back against austerity and neoliberal economics." 

Chávez's rhetoric also helped inspire the Spanish Marxist Pablo Iglesias to create Podemos, Spain's far-left party. Iglesias has long been suspected of taking Venezuelan money, though he denies it. 

Are We Finally Looking At #Lebanon’s #debt #default?

Thinking the unthinkable: Lebanon's sovereign debt default?

Matein Khalid

January 02, 2020

The unthinkable has finally happened in a secretive central bank's digital ledger in the heart of Beirut. The rating agency Fitch predicts imminent default on Lebanon's sovereign debt, at $88bn, a colossal 185% of GDP, making the once "Paris of the Middle East, the fabled reve d'Orient (dream of the East) a Levantine Argentina. While central bank data often lies in the emerging markets, Fitch's arithmetic of doom is irrefutable. Fitch estimates that the Banque du Liban, run by an ex-Merrill Lynch broker Riad Salameh as governor since 1993, owes $67 billion dollars to Lebanese banks in borrowings (liabilities) but has only $28 billion in net foreign exchange reserves.

Salameh's high stakes juggling act of borrowing money at exorbitant rates from Lebanese banks, flush with funds from a diaspora that extends from the Swiss Alps to São Paulo, from the diamond mines of West Africa to the glass towers of Dubai's DIFC Gate Village, to meet the state's $5 billion annual debt service obligations, maintain the Lebanese pound currency peg to King dollar, finance imports for a population whose elite defines la dolce vita on the East Med and bankroll a bloated, warlord/sectarian fissured public finance payroll, is now over.

Optically, Lebanon boasts $150 billion in banking deposits, three times its GDP, a ratio exceeded only by the banking systems of Hong Kong and Luxembourg. Yet this banking data is a cruel illusion, a hoax perpetuated on the hapless savers of Lebanon and its vast global diaspora. Lebanese banks have recklessly invested 50% of their assets in Lebanese government's Treasury bills, de facto post dated cheques/IOU's on a bankrupt bank. 

Where did these untold billions in debt vanish? 

Read the rest here: https://www.ameinfo.com/industry/finance/thinking-the-unthinkable-lebanons-sovereign-debt-default

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After #WeWork, #Oyo: #SoftBank’s #Startups' Bookkeeping is a Fairy Tale- Appropriately for Unicorns...

"If you screwed up that valuation so badly, what about all of the other companies in your portfolio?"

"That kind of fundraising apparatus is essentially unicorn porn."

Oyo is the other softbank company that is a scam.  

Its a cheap hotel operator in India that has gotten plenty of landlords into debt, in return for pie in the sky dreams from the company. They bought the hooters hotel in Las Vegas!! SEE https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/technology/softbank-startups.html    In the latest round of financing, look at this fast one pulled by Masa Son

Even as SoftBank ran into trouble with WeWork, it helped push up the valuation of Oyo with an unusual funding round. In October, the Japanese company and Agarwal together chipped in, raising the valuation to $10 billion. SoftBank touted the startup as a bright spot when it took the writedown for WeWork, booking a valuation gain of 590 billion yen on 25 investments, of which Oyo was the only one named.

Yet it turned out that Agarwal, now 26, had borrowed $2 billion to finance his share of the purchase from financial institutions, including Japan's Mizuho Financial Group Inc., people familiar with the matter have said. Son himself personally guaranteed the loans to Agarwal, according to another person familiar with the matter. 

In addition, two earlier investors in Oyo were Didi and Grab, the ride-hailing companies backed by SoftBank. That raises the question of whether money used to boost their valuations was then reused to hike the value of another SoftBank investment.-

AKA: A PONZI!!

After WeWork, SoftBank's Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

by Peter Elstrom and Pavel Alpeyev

In some cases, SoftBank's involvement in multiple funding rounds helped drive up startup valuations that resulted in paper profits for Son's company.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-26/after-wework-softbank-s-startup-bookkeeping-draws-scrutiny

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