So.... the report is here. I haven't read it. It's worth noting, (and the WSJ places emphasis on) the following:
Harry Markopolos brought down Bernie Madoff.
harry Markopolos was involved in taking down Enron.
However, Harry Markopolos is working for a hedge fund that's short GE and that he won't name.
And Harry Markopolos basically started the whistleblower bounty hunter business.
All that said, it's also worth noting two of the biggest money-sucks in GE's portfolio: pensions and oil.
- One allegation in Markopolos's report warns that GE cannot afford to cover the claims on its long-term insurance policies, which help policyholders pay for nursing homes and home health care, The Washington Post reported. The document also accuses GE of reporting earnings on people who held the policies when they were young, without correctly calculating how much it would have to spend to fund benefits for policyholders later in life.
Another allegation in the report says that GE should have recorded $9.6 billion of losses from Baker Hughes, an oil-and-gas company it owns, instead of the $2.2 billion it reported.
What are the odds that (especially) retail sector “debt reporting” practices like these are widespread, and the effective value of maaaaaaany companies isn’t as high as what the investors were lead to believe?
So weird! Never happened before
So I looked that up, and if Markopolos is really shilling now, what a shitty thing to do. That'd be like a climate scientist doing good work for two decades and then getting payed by Shell to claim they were simply wrong all that time.
Regardless, I eagerly await more high-profile instances of oil and gas companies failing to churn a profit.
I'm house hunting right now. I feel like I could save maybe $40,000 by waiting for the market to crash, but I'm donezo with apartments. And I wanna start building equity immediately.