Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, what you’re seeing a lot of today with the stock market is you’re seeing a lot of companies that have fallen 80, 90, 95 percent. Some companies will go completely out of business, but the ones that are falling got way out over their skis. And I want to give you a couple of examples.
And this is where the media gets excited about something – or the population doesn’t, but the media does. And an example of this is a company called Beyond Meat. Beyond Meat is a company that makes a product that is supposed to be a substitute for beef, and … their stock got as high as $234 a share.
It was a multi-multi-billion dollar company in terms of market cap, but it wasn’t making any money. And the stock is now down to $16 and change. So it has fallen close to 95 percent, something like that, and it still isn’t making money.
And here’s the problem for Beyond Meat. And that is when you get into the size of the market, 95 percent of the American people still like meat. And the other 5 percent aren’t necessarily Beyond Meat people. They’re vegetarians.
And so when you decide that you’re going to become this giant company and you cut out 95 percent of the market, you’re in a bit of trouble. And so it’s going to be interesting to see if Beyond Meat in fact, can turn the corner, or whether or not it can survive at all.
Now, just a bit of irony. They hired a COO, chief operating officer not long ago named Doug Ramsey. And apparently, at a football game in a parking lot, he got mad at another man, and he tried to bite off his nose. He got fired for that from Beyond Meat. And I think the reason is that he was trying to bite a piece of meat – as opposed to a vegan nose, it was a human nose. And that’s meat.
You can’t be our COO and decide that you’re going to like human noses. That just doesn’t work. Another example along those same lines, and there’s a whole string of these particular ones, you have a company like Nikola.
Now, Nikola is a company that was building, and still is trying, to build an electric truck, an all-electric truck. The founder of the company has been indicted and is now being tried for fraud.
It’s a little bit like that lady – and I don’t remember her name – on the rapid blood tests, and turned out that she was promoting a fraud. I think she believed she could eventually accomplish it with enough money. But the mistake that she made was she claimed that she already had, and she hadn’t.
And in this case with this fellow, this fellow is on video where he has taken one of his trucks and put it on a hill and rolled it down – because it wouldn’t run – and rolled it down the hill and then took the video and flattened it out so it made it look like it was rolling down a road.
And so this is a problem that he’s going to have in court. But that stock reached a high of $67 and it’s currently at $4 and going lower. So it, too, has lost almost 95 percent of its value. And we’re going to see this across a whole sector.
And this is what happens when the media and the government decide, for example, Beyond Meat became so popular because people believe that the government’s going to eliminate cows, because of so-called cow flatulence and how it affects the atmosphere, which is false.
I mean, I’m not going to say it doesn’t affect it, but the effect it has on it is so insignificant that it’s not going to get rid of meat, certainly not in the time period that Beyond Meat would make it. And in the electronic truck world, this truck might be able to go 200 miles without a charge, but that’s without a load. That’s without having to pull a load.
So I think there’s going to be a huge fallout. The stock market itself is already falling. At another time, Michael, I want to talk about what I see coming as a coming liquidity crisis being caused by a confluence of terrible decisions by government officials all across the globe.
And we could do that a little bit later in the show, but these two particular stories are examples of left-wing ideology and this so-called ESG stuff promoting stocks and companies that have no economic reason to exist, at least not so far. And then if you don’t have an economic reason to exist, eventually, your stock will go to zero.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Beyond Meat” by Beyond Meat.
