Thursday, May 24, 2012

Good Thing We Got in on that Facebook Stock Thing

This edition of what Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone brought to you by Bank of America which despite nature of company as greedy, bloodsucking parasites leeching off the commonweal has treated me fairly well, even temporarily disabling my debit card after it made a charity donation to Queens Park Rangers relief fund, a donation in British pounds.


This automatically made BOA computers burp, which reassures me the mythical Nigerian prince needing me to get millions of pounds out of his country won't actually get any money out of my account if denominated in foreign currency.


Preceding paragraph NOT paid for by BOA, but they COULD shovel $ my way if they wish.


[A suit has been filed by Facebook shareholders against Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Morgan Stanley and others. It's based on a very simple concept: when internal analysts learned that Facebook’s numbers were going to be worse than expected, the company and its bankers didn’t tell everyone, but just "selectively disclosed" information to a small group of "preferred investors."

Henry Blodget, who unfortunately should know about these things, gave a good summary of it all on CBS This Morning:

I was on the phone last night with a former hedge fund CEO who was talking about this. "Facebook," he said, "is a colossal example of a complete clusterfuck where everybody wins except the ordinary investor."

His point was that virtually every week now we see stories like this that hint at a kind of two-tiered market system – in which most of the real action takes place inside an unregulated black-box network of connected insiders who don’t disclose their relationships or their interests, while everyone else, i.e. the regular suckers, live in the more tightly-policed world of prospectuses and quarterly reporting and so on.] emphasis added, links in original
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-facebook-ipo-shareholders-werent-invited-to-the-real-party-20120523#ixzz1vnrzAXGv

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