Thing One: Preparing For Divorce: Europe and Greece are at the stage in their stormy marriage where they are consulting with divorce lawyers. And we may all feel the pain of their breakup. European leaders did little but bicker at an informal dinner summit in Brussels yesterday, The New York Times writes, a predictable development that nonetheless briefly roiled world markets. They all came out mumbling support for the idea of Greece staying in the euro zone, but also said they were developing contingency plans for its eventual exit. Germans, meanwhile, have already said goodbye in their minds, according to Zero Hedge's reading of the German press. This morning, euro-zone manufacturing data and German confidence numbers came in ugly, Bloomberg writes, highlighting the already sad ... Continue reading →
Thing One: Welcome To Facebook's Nightmare: The Facebook IPO has quickly turned from a mild embarrassment into a five-alarm nightmare. While hundreds of millions of shares of Facebook have changed hands, at ever-falling prices, nearly as many pieces of legal paper have been served, too, with more certainly to come. Massachusetts subpoenaed Morgan Stanley, looking for information about a Reuters report that only some investors were informed of revenue-forecast cuts just ahead of the IPO. An investor sued exchange operator Nasdaq OMX over botching the IPO, and Nasdaq's head of transaction services said the IPO would not have gone forward, had the exchange known how badly it would be wracked by technical difficulties. Let's see, what else? Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said ... Continue reading →
Thing One: Facebook Blame Game: The hot new Facebook game is not Farmville or Mob Wars but the Blame Game. Who is to blame for Facebook's IPO being a big honking disaster? And I think we can safely call it a full-fledged disaster now, without getting our heads snapped off by its defenders. The stock tumbled 11 percent on Monday, its second day of trading and its first without the Herculean market support of its lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley. The bank is the chief suspect in the failure of the IPO to live up to the ridiculous expectations built for it, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times write. It issued too many shares and raised the price too high. At the same ... Continue reading →
Champion American complainer Jamie Dimon complained on Monday about Wall Street regulation, while also insisting he not be described as a complainer. All the while, his bank's losses, partly resulting from lax regulation, continued to grow. An initial $2 billion trading loss is now likely well north of $30 billion, including a 19 percent drop in the bank's stock price. To strengthen the Cognitive Dissonance Vortex he had created, the JPMorgan Chase CEO's comments came as the ink was still drying on news reports that reminded everybody of why the Wall Street regulation he complains about constantly is necessary in the first place. Namely, the Wall Street Journal reported that a top risk-management officer at JPMorgan apparently had a spotty track record of risk-management. And ... Continue reading →
Thing One: Facebook Fallout: At least the Facebook IPO resulted in a wedding. Otherwise it might have been a total disaster. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg married his long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan on Saturday in a surprise ceremony in his backyard -- a brilliant legal move, some California divorce lawyers told Reuters. A less-happy gathering also took place on Saturday, when Nasdaq's board met to discuss what the hell happened with Facebook's much-hyped IPO on Friday. Trading was delayed and then marred by technical glitches, in which traders didn't know whether or not they'd actually purchased Facebook shares for several hours, the Wall Street Journal writes -- amounting to multiple eternities these days. Oh, and the stock price went nowhere, reflecting badly on the IPO underwriters, ... Continue reading →
