Credit Where It’s Due March 12, 2018March 10, 2018 But first . . . P.: “I tried to buy more BOREF at $4.90 Friday but Fidelity is refusing to accept opening trades since they’ve stopped reporting financials. What’s going on?” The company says they prefer to concentrate all available funds on the task at hand — bringing WheelTug to market — rather than pay to report the way they used to. They “meet all their corporate requirements” and post their financials on-line. The stock remains a terrific speculation in my view (perhaps colored by my owning a gazillion shares). At $4.90, it’s valued at $25 million (or you could buy this apartment), about where it was six years ago . . . before its subsidiary, WheelTug, had more than 20 airlines signed up with 1,042 planes in queue; before the FAA had signed off on WheelTug’s certification plan; before it had 140 patents pending or issued. In 2014, with the stock at $16.50, I estimated its fair value at between $2.79 and $338. The analysis still holds — and depends entirely on the assumptions you plug into it. (I had placed the odds of failure between 90% and 60%. Now, I like to think, they’re lower.) Only buy shares with money you can truly afford to lose; and by placing a “limit order,” lest you pay more than you meant to. Ameritrade and others do still accept orders. And now . . . It would be great if Trump can denuke North Korea. When Obama did this with Iran, he had an MIT nuclear physicist running his Energy Department, to assure that the technical aspects of the deal were airtight. Trump has Rick Perry. Trump believes the Iran deal was horrible. In fact: It’s working. And took thousands of hours to get right. And runs 159 pages compared with the 4-page deal with North Korea in 1994 that failed. Trump further believes he will be able to pull off a North Korea deal that holds up over the years, as the Iran deal has but the previous North Korea deal did not. If he can, it would be wonderful and he would deserve credit. My worry is that he will take credit even if he makes a very bad deal — as he took credit for “the largest Electoral College victory since Ronald Reagan” (which it was not) . . . the largest Inaugural crowd in history (which it was not) . . . the largest tax cut in history (which it was not — but which was, according to Reagan budget director David Stockman and most other economists, a massively irresponsible tax cut at exactly the wrong time in the business cycle, endangering our children with yet more debt and starving us of the funds needed to revitalize our uncompetitive crumbling infrastructure). This seems to be his M.O. Things were horrible under Obama. Things are amazing under him. Under Obama, unemployment was “28%, 29%, as high as 35%.” But now? “Our program is working far beyond our wildest expectations,” he told last week’s Latino Coalition Legislative Summit. Not just working. Or working beyond expectations. Or working far beyond expectations. No — working far beyond our wildest expectations. He went on to say, as evidence of this, “We’ve created nearly 3 million jobs since the election. Think of that. Three million jobs. If I would have said that prior to the election, nobody would have believed it. (Applause.) Right? They would not have believed it.” In fact, he inherited an economy that had produced 75 consecutive months of private sector job growth and — with the help of a massively irresponsible tax cut to juice the economy further — kept it going at about the same pace. (Slightly fewer jobs were created in Trump’s first year than in Obama’s last.) Obama rescued the world from the brink of the global depression his Republican predecessor had handed him. He brought unemployment down from a peak of 10% to under 5% (chart here). That was horrible. With Trump, the economy, has finally begun to recover; everybody has “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost”; the middle class is rolling in money from a tax bill Trump selflessly accepted, though it would “cost him a fortune.” And Mexico is paying for a beautiful wall that’s finally staunched the flood of rapists and murderers. In short, we are winning so much — except maybe against Putin — we’ve begun to grow tired of winning. It is a beautiful thing. That I can tell you. Believe me.