Of all of the desperate, inspired, cockamamie ideas proffered by companies in dire straits to pump up stock prices or otherwise stave off disaster and demise in this fetid, pandemic-infested world, none was quite so brazen as that offered by Hertz. After the better part of a decade of bad decisions and pivots that ultimately went nowhere, the bankrupt car-rental company at last came up with a stroke of pure genius: Why not sell a half-billion dollars’ worth of stock, and we use the term “worth” loosely, as in the very regulatory filing making that offer, Hertz conceded that those shares would prove almost certainly worthless? If the stock-market Stoolies couldn’t get enough of the stuff, why not indeed?