Courtesy of Lee Adler of the Wall Street Examiner
…Had Facebook openly set out to sabotage its own IPO, it could not have invented a better or more remarkable debacle: a tale of financial chaos fit for history books.
Facebook stock has lost 20% of its value in only three days. In that alone, it is not remarkable…
…No, what makes Facebook stand out is that, at nearly every junction where wisdom, care and moderation ought to have intervened, they did not. In law enforcement, this is called a “smash and grab” – just knocking out the windows and taking everything in sight. On Wall Street, the disregard of the IPO for normal investors brought up a vulgar old traders’ saying: “Pigs get slaughtered.” Translation: greed gets punished…
There was gracelessness: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, made it clear for months that he disdained the company’s IPO, and deigned to show up to only one meeting with potential investors…
There was greed: executives and insiders made the IPO primarily a way to enrich their own fortunes – rather than the company’s – and their stock dump accounted for 57% of the shares sold in the offering (reinforcing the old joke that “IPO” stands not for “initial public offering”, but “insider profit opportunity”)…
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