I never personally cared for the term — “corporate raider.”
If a fund can come in and fix a company by changing its management and the stock performs well aren’t we all better off?
It seems to me that the difference between a raider and a savior is a bit like the difference between a true and false prophet. A Biblically literate friend of mine once told me that the only way to know if a prophet is true or false is whether or not the prophecy comes true. We need prophets who work to make their prophecy true. I think stock market returns are as good a tell as anything else.
And so it happens that we’re going to need a type of raider who takes over the American domiciled companies which aren’t in the interest of the United States and cleans them up, or turns them to the good.
We’re going to need privateers. We’re going to need a lot of Francis Drakes who, with the sanction of King Charles and Joe Biden, seize the commanding heights back from the peer rivals and, after some refurbishing, installing new captains to lead those erstwhile compromised companies.
If you pay attention to this Substack you’d know that I suspect that that has already happened at Facebook where Sheryl Sandberg was defenestrated in favor of Nick Clegg and at Google which is hiring former intelligence professionals at a rapid clip. I suspect that Microsoft, which was always too Israeli, too Russian, too Indian, too Chinese, will struggle in this coming period.
While we Americans have our own definition of what constitutes a commanding height I suppose a better frame would be to consider our peer adversaries and think about what they consider their commanding heights. After all the term itself comes from a speech by none other than Vladimir Lenin and was repurposed in a book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Too much capital, especially foreign capital, has led to lazy mismanagement. In some cases there’s downright compromised management, especially in areas that China seeks to dominate. It’s easy to win the race if you drug the other player.
But today Chinese capital is fleeing the American system and the U.S. deep state is seemingly sick of Beijing’s nonsense. Expect, therefore, the Chinese-compromised companies to struggle. And given that the Commerce Department is going hard against at a lot of these Chinese entities, expect that they’ll mutate and try to find other forms to get into our markets, especially in law enforcement technology.
That, of course, isn’t enough. We’ve got to turn the compromised companies to productive ends and we have to do it fast. This will require very uncomfortable conversations with lots of Silicon Valley companies and those conversations will need to happen before the companies are dumped on retail investors.
Now we’ve already seen the role that some of this capital flight plays when we examine the Chinese-Israeli and Russian-Israeli banks which recently failed.
Signature Bank
Silicon Valley Bank
You might ask, as we have, whether these two banks are even banks at all but fronts masquerading as banks.
We have a lot of compromised companies and agencies and we can have a certain flavor of the company based upon who they hire.
NSA (GCHQ) — British
CIA — British/Jewish deep state (Dulles)
FBI — Mob done good (Hoover)
DHS/DEA — Likud/Mexican/redneck (Chertoff)
You may have noticed scandals within the FBI, the DHS, and the DEA lately. This isn’t an accident but this will be more and more common.
The transition to SIGINT (AUKUS, Ukraine War) from HUMINT (War on Terror, January 6th) is going to be the story of the coming decade, especially as the CHIPS Act comes online. Overtime America’s allies are going to demand the American chip over the Chinese ones.
The proliferation of social media vastly increases OSINT and it is now possible for highly obsessive people to do the sorts of research from home that seasoned CIA analysts once did. This trend will likely only continue as satellite imagery data, facial recognition tools, and genetic sequencers become increasingly cheap and available.
Is it possible to build an activist fund that is AUKUS-aligned (and which protects pensioners, retail) using SIGINT tips and OSINT researchers?
I think it is. Think of it as Bellingcat meets Carl Icahn.