This Hertz fiasco is one of the most-sordid, depressing stories in market history. The company shares are worthless or close to it.

Yet somehow Robinhood traders were duped into pumping it.

The bond holders need to be made 100% whole before equity gets a sense. To give you a sesne of where that stands, the 2022 bonds are trading at 42-cents and that’s about par for the course. There is a total of 5.5B in debt outstanding overall so at 42% recovery, that’s something like a 2.3B shortfall.

That all needs to be paid out by liquidating whatever assets are left.

Somehow the equity is trading at $2.83 and the bondholders got the idea to sell $1 billion in shares, which was approximately 247m shares at the levels where they petitioned the judge. That compares to 142m currently outstanding in the entire float.

The bondholders have been honest with the judge. They told him “the common stock could ultimately be worthless.”

But, hey, if we offer $1B in shares and someone wants to buy them, who is the judge to stop it? The judge just agreed in a decision shortly after the close.

Now I don’t think they’ll actually be able to float that much stock at reasonable levels but in this market, you never know. In any case, that money will go straight from the stock holders to the bond holders who no-doubt can’t believe their good fortune.

The NYSE is already in the process of delisting HTZ.

On the one hand, this is hilarious. On the other, it says so many bad things about market functioning, the intellect of market participants and the overall madness of crowds; that it’s frightening.