BY DANIEL GILBERT AND RYAN DEZEMBER Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp., once described oil buried in a layer of rock that stretches from the outskirts of Cleveland to West Virginia as "the biggest thing to hit Ohio since the plow." Mr. McClendon bet big on that new oil field, the Utica Shale, paying billions of dollars over the last two years for drilling rights to 1.3 million acres of it, or about 5% of Ohio's land area. Now, Chesapeake is raising its bet—ramping up drilling on a promising but unproven oil field, at a time when the embattled natural-gas giant is under financial stress ...BY DANIEL GILBERT AND RYAN DEZEMBER Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp., once described oil buried in a ... Continue reading →
NEW YORK (AP) -- Almost four years after the financial crisis, Wall Street still can't get it right. Investor anger mounted Wednesday over the initial public offering of Facebook stock last week, which was fumbled by the banks that managed the deal and complicated by technical problems at the Nasdaq stock exchange. Shareholders filed at least two lawsuits against Facebook and Morgan Stanley, the bank that shepherded the IPO, over reports that it withheld negative analyst reports about Facebook from some clients before the company went public. It was the second stumble this month by a major Wall Street firm. JPMorgan Chase, usually revered for taming risk, has yet to contain a growing $2 billion loss in one of its trading units. The missteps are ... Continue reading →
Who, if anyone, will pay?Facebook’s initial public offering was one of the highest profile stock offerings ever. Now, it may develop into the most litigated.At least three shareholder lawsuits have so far been brought against Facebook and the three leading underwriters of the I.P.O,, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, alleging that Facebook failed to disclose material information about its growth prospects.The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, are also looking at the company and its lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley, along with the Nasdaq market over how it handled the initial flow of orders on the first day of trading.The question now is how all of these suits and investigations are likely to play out.The shareholder lawsuits are ... Continue reading →
