They Do Ring A Bell At The Top: Alibaba Proves Wall Street Is Off Its Rocker

By David Stockman, Budget Director under President Reagan and author of the bestseller, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. This article originally appeared on David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

They do ring a bell at the top.

On Friday Alibaba gained $65 billion of market cap in 5 minutes!  And that was on top of the $170 billion IPO price—-a valuation that was not all that shabby to begin with.  In fact,  BABA weighed in for the opening bell at 20X its $8.6 billion in sales.

Well, the red-hot multiple was not actually with reference to the company’s results, but to its drop-box financials. That is, before the day was over, it was trading at 27X the LTM sales posted for a shell in the Cayman Islands—an entity on the word processor of a law office located there which may or may not receive actual cash dividends and honest accounting statements from a myriad of entities that do countless things in China.

Ah, yes, in China—the most stupendous bubble of unsustainable construction, borrowing, speculation and corruption known to the pages of history.

So with regards to BABA’s $230 billion market cap at week’s end, you can say this: None dare call it price discovery!

What it shows is that Wall Street is truly off it rocker. The Chinese swindlers behind BABA didn’t even have to tap their home market. These preposterously over-valued shares were sold overwhelmingly to Wall Street—to the gamblers, speculators and robo-traders that have occupied what was once a reasonably honest capital market.

It’s not just that the $25 billion raised in the offering will go in part to insiders and in part to a blind pool for the acquisition of anything operating in China or not in China. That isn’t the real red flag. The real one is, well, an actual red flag.  Namely, the utterly unexamined idea that China is just another capitalist economy like the US, UK or even Italy, for crying out loud; and that it is galloping off into a glorious future and a middle-class consumption orgy that will make what takes place daily in America’s 3,800 Wal-Marts look diminutive.

The Wall Street brokers thus threw up a storm of statistics about BABA’s GMV (gross merchandise volume) of $300 billion being 3X that of Amazon. And that the number of customers at 279 million is more than the number of adult Americans. Then there are also 8.5 million sellers, 14.5 billion annual orders, and also customers that are eagerly adopting mobile purchasing—a metric that is up 38% to 188 million in the last six months yet still only a small fraction of China’s 700 million internet users.  In short, the pitch is a modern version of “a billion lamps to China.”

Well, I’m sorry kids. China is a monstrous house of economic cards and an inherently unstable polity that will blow sky-high in a matter of time—and probably not that much more time. You can’t capitalize what is nothing more than a proxy for everyday retail commerce in China’s maniacal economy with a PE meant for real capitalist enterprises that have invented something of profoundly transformative significance, such Google—or in their day, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and the Ford Motor Company.

By contrast, Alibaba is a purely derivative mass merchant of e-commerce. It is a Chinese copy of Amazon, eBay, PayPal, YouTube, Twitter and the New York Yankees—all rolled into an opaque and convoluted financial pyramid that would have made Goldman Sach’s ill-fated schemes of 1929 look reasonable. Moreover, even its Cayman Island grade financials prove that there is absolutely nothing unique and non-replicable about the business model of this purveyor of stupendous volumes of cheap stuff to China’s retail masses.

There is no known capitalist market in which a mass merchandiser with no inventories, no stores, no warehouses, no patents, no state monopoly and virtually no fixed assets whatsoever is worth $230 billion. Indeed, BABA has virtually no working capital and the only assets visible on its balance sheet are cash, $300 million worth of un-depreciated computer software and equipment and $6 billion of intangibles and advances spread among the archipelago of entities that comprise the house which Jack (Ma) built.

Yes, it’s all new age retail – an internet based purveyor of e-commerce. But that’s just the point: there are no barriers to entry and plenty of competition. In fact, Alibaba is just a cyberspace broker that even in a real capitalist economy would have an impossible time warding off competition and erosion of its currently super-fat first mover margins. And it surely does have rambunctious competition in China’s essentially lawless internet space, such a Tencent Holdings and the 500 million users of its smartphone messaging apps services, potentially all of whom are being converted to on-line shopping.

That’s very different than Amazon, for example, which carries $8 billion of inventories and $12 billion of fixed PPE—mainly in its massive warehousing and distribution system. That’s not just a barrier to entry—its a veritable bricks and mortar wall.

But here’s the thing. BABA isn’t remotely worth $230 billion because even in China its 40% broker’s margins cannot possibly endure the tsunami of competition it is likely to face—even in the near future. But honest PE multiples and capitalization rates are driven by the longer-term future, and China’s middle class doesn’t have a bright one!”

This is just another version of Japan Inc.—a state-built house of debt, export mercantilism and fabulous over-investment that eventually came to a dead stop 20 years ago. And Japan at least had some rudiments of true capitalism such as law, contracts and some vestiges of market discipline.

As to the case of China’s red capitalism, however, there is no place in the history books where you can find a booming economy that is so artificial, fragile and prone to cataclysmic accident. It has not grown organically from the grass roots owing to capitalist enterprise. Not in the slightest.

Instead, it has been concocted from the center by communist party bureaucrats who discovered the miracle of an unhinged printing press; who adopted the economic arithmetic of Keynesian GDP accounting under the slogan “if you build it, we will count it”; who created a vast pyramidal apparatus of credit distribution down a cascade of corruption that is pleased to call itself a banking system; and which is now swamped in mindless, debt-fueled speculation and building without any semblance of economic discipline, efficiency or rationality.

That is how a backward economy which was until recently run according to the precepts of Mao’s little red book managed to balloon its total credit outstanding from $1 trillion to $25 trillion in just 14 years after the turn of the century.  That is how an orgy of construction resulted in more cement production in China during 2012-2013 than in the USA during the entire 20th century—a time which witnessed the building of the New York subway, the Hoover Dam, the vast expanse of Army Corps of Engineers waterways, the Interstate Highway system, the sprawl of American suburbia and its 13 billion square feet of mall space, among countless others.

It is also how China ended up with upwards of 70 million empty apartments, thousands of miles of bridges and roads that are virtually unused, notorious and proliferating ghost cities, and thousands of miles of hastily built high-speed railways that are unsafe and mired in corruption. It is also the well-spring of a precarious system of local government finance that is based on little more than monumental speculation and inflation of the price of the lands which were seized by the state 65 years ago. And the list goes on and on.

That there will be a thundering collapse of China’s stupendous borrowing and building spree is only a matter of if, not when. And in that event, the mirage of China’s booming middle class will become painfully evident. Indeed, it is the very same frenetic buyers of stuff on BABA websites who have jobs which will disappear when the building boom stops and who have asset ledgers which will violently deflate when China’s towering debt bubble finally bursts.

So why did Wall Street capitalize an opaque mass merchant operating in a precarious economy at 27X sales? The answer is that Wall Street is a momentum driven casino that is now over-valuing everything that moves and all that stands still.

That’s the ultimate evil of monetary central planning. Having destroyed honest price discovery in the financial markets, the Fed now “accommodates” the speculators one meeting at a time—in deathly fear of a hissy fit that will bring down the entire phony edifice of insensible asset inflation that it has midwifed since the last financial crisis. You would think that absurdities like the Alibaba IPO would finally get the attention of our clueless monetary politburo.

But apparently not. As they watch the market climb the precarious chart pattern shown below, you wonder where they think it will all end. Unfortunately for the American people, the nirvana of Keynesian full employment does not suggest itself as one of the possibilities. By David Stockman, David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

Also by David Stockman: Even the comrades in Beijing know that China’s credit tsunami has unleashed a dangerous speculative mania that has no parallel in human history. Read…. HSBC Turns into China Stimulus Junkie

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  6 comments for “They Do Ring A Bell At The Top: Alibaba Proves Wall Street Is Off Its Rocker

  1. thom says:

    Chinese Communist Capitalism is what it is. And we have the same kind of thing — Chinese Communist Capitalism on Wall Street and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the state apparatus.

  2. jan frank says:

    I know it sounds piddling, but look at street level every day experience. I am as eager as anyone to buy cheap, so I scour the internet for bargains. These bargains come from China. Wow! A quarter of the price from anywhere else. And I, like most other people I know, am reluctant to buy anything Chinese again, since I know that, although some of the stuff I get is a real bargain and well made, a lot of it (most?) is shoddy and has to be replaced within weeks. You think I’m going to buy these shares?

  3. Archy Don says:

    Alibaba emits all the requisite aromas of a scam.

    Is this asymmetrical warfare?

    Meanwhile, false Chinese drivers’ licenses are flooding Illinois. http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/09/22/2-investigators-china-floods-u-s-with-near-perfect-fake-drivers-licenses/

  4. Gil Obrero says:

    I replied to a previous post by Davis Stockman, at http://wolfstreet.com/2014/09/04/hsbc-turns-into-china-stimulus-junkie/.

    In that I explained how on a visit to meet friends in Guangzhou, we discussed the flight by not particular wealthy Chinese , but ordinary middle class Chinese, and how, after having drinks and discussing the reasons why China was surreptitiously allowing all and sundry to shift cash out of China, together with my friend, a sports shoe factory owner and who distributes virtually worldwide, and and some his friends both in government and in banking and finance, worked out out a plan to capitalize on this phenomenon.

    It worked wonderfully, and having secured contracts with a major well known, in fact known all over the world, UK PLC with a brand name known everywhere, and a very go getting financial services company expanding rapidly in Asia, and setting up a new website, corporations in te UK China and the Philippines, where the actual operations will be based and thus effectively neutering any involvement from either the Chinese Government or the UK government, not least in the area of regulation and taxes, we have after just three short months of planning and setting up are now fully operational and growing very fast.

    And again another totally straightforward, dyed in the wool of common sense article from David again points out to clearly what so many of can see.

    One thing I could possibly add to Davids article, is that unlike the wall street clowns, the fed, and the myriads of gibbering mouths propelled by minds as vacant as the shells of all the South Sea, 1929 or dot com companies, and all the other long gone ghosts of the next big thing, who seem to believe the utter drivel they spout, the Chinese are generally more down to earth, and have a far greater grasp of reality.

    They may say nothing, they may give you no indication of what they are thinking, they will play along with you, smile at you you an thank you profusely for your advice, but do not be fooled.

    The average Chinese middle wage earner and small business owner is acutely aware of the dangers to his portfolio and and has an even greater grasp of what a real assets value is.
    They don’t overpay for things when cold hard cash is involved, and talking this week about BABA and with whom my friend who owns the shoe factory, has a large online store hosted by Alibaba, he says that not one person he knows would even consider for one second, buying stock in that company.

    Mr Stockman is correct, the Chinese people the ordinary Chinese feel it, something is amiss and they say nothing but quietly make plans.

    There is a tsunami of liquidity that the Chinese want to let flow out of China and the right operation can ease tremendously that exit of the excess and thus potentially ease inflation in China whilst gathering hard assets overseas for its citizens.
    It is something other CB,s are desperate to avert and watching Chinese banks and big financial corporations like a hawk.
    But they cannot watch all the hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese that want to diversify their savings overseas into real tangible hard assets.
    There are some fantastic opportunities created by those who now seem to live on a diet of magic mushrooms , DMT and LSD.

    I would like to write more, especially in real hard practical terms of what exactly to look for and exactly how to go about doing it, what not to do and what you should do, who to contact and who can help, But most of all how to get it offshore and out of IRS or Bureaucrats grasp.
    Then you will prosper as this magnificent once in a millennia opportunity unwinds as the rest of the western world crashes to virtual oblivion.
    Those in charge are living in a fantasy world, cloud cuckoo never never land, and that makes this the perfect time to see reality and take the opportunities that are out there by the thousands. And the best part about it, is that they so blinded to reality they cant see you doing what you do.

  5. NotSoSure says:

    Another one of “David Stockman REALLY HATES CHINA” article. It’s probably true that the Chinese economy is probably a Ponzi scheme, etc, etc but that does not mean that Alibaba has not done something important i.e. it does help people in the rural areas to connect to many other places in China, thus helping to lift them out of poverty. And it’s not just Alibaba who copies things from the US, heck the Germans with Rocket Internet specializes in doing exactly that, and you are not seeing Stockman complaining about that. When it comes to China, Stockman really likes to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean pretty soon he’ll claim that those manufactured iPhones are also made from Ponzi materials.

    Let’s get real, the only reason this article appears is that his call of the top of the market the last time missed the mark.

    • Gil Obrero says:

      I check the math and I am now more than confident that the market topped in the first week of April.

      Its now now decaying inside, positioning is stopping the market hitting new tops, and when I mean new tops at this balloon level it needs to start thinking of 2100, 2200 very soon , like within a month.

      By the end of October early November it will be a great time to start testing with 10 to 15 % of my now totally unencumbered cash shorting the market, all I need to see is that the market can’t even make a new top above 1 % higher than today’s last high.

      That’s enough then to determine the direction with a 90% probability.
      And that is down.
      From then on its time to hold your hat and I will not stop shorting it all the way down past 1000.

      Unless of course something truly remarkable happens .
      Possibly like WWIII declared

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