What a sordid saga
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.
Some very spicy comments from the Hungarian prime minister who basically tells the world to get lost (please admire effort to remain polite on his part). In so many words it’s not his fault, it’s the previous administration’s fault. Sounds familiar? Obama has used it at will, Greece has used it, I heard Sarkozy use it, and just about everybody else! Even Republicans who campaigned to “Drill baby drill!” now blame the BP fiasco on Obama. Needless to say political courage is something that no longer exists, and populism has been the only political program offered to us for now a solid 40 years. The natural extension is for a Prime Minister to just walk in and say: “You know what screw you guys, we will default, I am not taking back tax cuts that got me elected, I am not telling people who were promised early retirement that really it’s not feasible, I’m just not going to deal with any of this. Let’s just default and keep doing what we were doing”. In the same line of thought the French PM declared this morning that there is nothing bad about EURUSD at parity.