The Inimitable Tiff

As posted by Dan Ariely, due to the ties about ethical behavior.

As the lead bank on your deal, Morgan Stanley is likely to get 30% of the overall take. This means that your closest investment banking “friend” will make a bit more than $200 million from your IPO.

Morgan Stanley and the rest of the investment banks involved will also make sure that their favorite fund manager client “friends” are given lots of free money. Assuming that these “friends” are given 75% of the total number of IPO shares, or a total of 291 million shares, and assuming that the stock does rise from $40 to $50, then these fund managers will collectively, in one day, make $2.9 billion dollars in realized or unrealized profits.  That’s right, 2.9 BILLION DOLLARS.

Mark, by now you must be asking yourself the obvious question. “Where and out of whose pocket does this money come from?”

Via @erikhinton.

campaignfinance:

A message from the President/Treasurer/Grand Poobah of Why Not ZoidPAC?, filed at around 2:30 a.m.:

To Whom I May Concern: This memo is primarily intended as a test: I recognize the gravity generally attached to something like the submission of a form to the FEC, but I wanted to confirm for myself that the Federal Elections Comission lives up to its lofty goal of transparency.

It recently occurred to me that as President, Grand Poobah, and (most importantly here, anyway) Treasurer of the Why Not ZoidPAC? Super PAC, I possess the ability to submit these Form 99s electronically and have them displayed publicly at http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00514646 . I also understand that these forms are primarily meant as written statements addressing the FEC directly; however, I don’t see how or why I should be limited against using this kind of form to make a publicly recorded note of assorted positions and opinions I wish to share.

I suppose my question to you, the FEC filer reading this form, is: is this OK? I don’t see many examples (any, really) of this sort of thing, but it seems like an intriguing way to submit positions and ideas to the public record on behalf of Why Not ZoidPAC.

Should this be allowed to work, I’d like to address the few hypothetical people who might have somehow discovered this document through the public filing. Hello, to you as well! I suppose this is kind of like a blog post to you. We’ll see.

Whomever may be reading this, thank you for your time.

Respectfully,

Daniel Ben-David

President/Treasurer/Grand Poobah, “Why Not ZoidPAC?