The inevitable is finally starting to unfold. The downgrade to triple-C by Moody’s came as a surprise, at least to me. Historically Moody’s has been the last to downgrade collapsing companies. The most famous was its failure to downgrade Enron until about a week before Enron folded. Perhaps this time around it decided to get out in front of the obvious.
Tesla’s continued existence, despite obvious operational and financial problems that were growing in scale by the week, was enabled by the most lascivious monetary policy in U.S. Central Bank history. For me the coup de grace was the $1.5 billion junk bond deal floated last summer. It was emblematic of rookie money managers, unsupervised children in the sandbox, shoveling other people’s money into a cash-burning furnace.
Most managers running retail and pension money have no idea what a triple-hook rating means for any company with massive cash flow deficits operating in a financial environment in which the Fed is not printing trillions of dollars that can be recycled into bad ideas.
Even without the nearly $10 billion in debt on top of several billion in negative free cash flow, TSLA has billions in off-balance-sheet liabilities that don’t seem to exist as long as the Fed is injecting free cash into the financial system for inexperienced money managers to abuse.
All of that changes with a falling stock market and a triple-C credit rating. Now the obvious operational impossibilities and questionably fraudulent projections by Elon Musk will become quite relevant. If those don’t sink the ship, perhaps the SEC investigations, the ones that Musk forgot to disclose, will put an end to Tesla’s Waterloo. Unless the Fed reverses course and re-implements ZIRP and money printing, it will be next impossible for Tesla to raise the several billion it will need to keep its cancer-infested rodent moving its legs on the gerbil-wheel.
If you are invested in TRowe and Fidelity funds with large exposure to Tesla, I highly recommend selling them. At this point the only prayer the managers running those funds have is to throw more of other-people’s-money into Tesla’s furnace and pray for the Second Coming to save them.
Tesla is going to collapse. The collapse will likely occur in the next 12 months unless there’s some form of exogenous intervention. I doubt the Easter Bunny will deliver that sort of help this weekend. Moody’s “bold” downgrade to triple-C has sealed the fate.