>>a while back someone published a track record for her and a schedule of her firm's investment banking business ... the circumstantials in that were pretty compelling...<<
Everyone knows this is going on and it stinks to high heaven. I assume you read Michael Lewis's excellent article in the New York Times about Jonathan Lebed. Lewis makes the point over and over that the practice you discribe is no different than what Lebed did, only much worse because the brokers are more trusted. Upgrading a stock because your brokerage is going to do a secondary differs from pump-and-dump how? The Chinese Wall bullshit is just that. I think the SEC should outlaw this type of practice, and prosecute the analysts and firms who engage in it.
>>Even a 14-year-old boy could see how it all worked, why some guy
working for free out of his basement in Jackson, Mo., was more reliable
than the most highly paid analyst on Wall Street. The companies that
financial pros were paid to analyze were also the financial pros' biggest
customers. Xerox and AT&T and the rest needed to put the right spin on
their quarterly earnings. The goal at the end of every quarter was for the
newspapers and the cable television shows and the rest to announce that
they had "exceeded analysts' expectations." The easiest way to exceed
analysts' expectations was to have the analysts lower them. And that's
just what they did, and had been doing for years. The guy in Carmel,
Calif., confessed to Bloomberg that all he had to do to be more accurate
on the earnings estimates than Wall Street analysts was to raise all of
them 10 percent.
A year later, when the Internet bubble burst, the hollowness of the pros
only became clearer. The most famous analysts on Wall Street, who just
a few weeks before had done whatever they could to cadge an
appearance on CNBC or a quote in The Wall Street Journal to promote
their favorite dot-com, went into hiding. Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker,
who made $15 million in 1999 while telling people to buy Priceline when
it was at $165 a share and Healtheon/WebMD when it reached $105 a
share, went silent as they collapsed toward zero.
Financial professionals had entered some weird new head space. They
simply took it for granted that a "financial market" was a collection of
people doing their best to get onto CNBC and CNNfn and into the
Heard on the Street column of The Wall Street Journal and the Lex
column of The Financial Times, where they could advance their narrow
self-interests.
To anyone who wandered into the money culture after, say, January
1996, it would have seemed absurd to take anything said by putative
financial experts at face value. There was no reason to get worked up
about it. The stock market was not an abstraction whose integrity needed
to be preserved for the sake of democracy. It was a game people played
to make money. Who cared if anything anyone said or believed was
"real"? Capitalism could now afford for money to be viewed as no
different from anything else you might buy or sell.
Or, as Jonathan Lebed wrote to his lawyer:
"Every morning I watch Shop at Home, a show on cable television that
sells such products as baseball cards, coins and electronics. Don West,
the host of the show, always says things like, 'This is one of the best deals
in the history of Shop at Home! This is a no-brainer folks! This is
absolutely unbelievable, congratulations to everybody who got in on this!
Folks, you got to get in on the line, this is a gift, I just can't believe this!'
There is absolutely nothing wrong with him making quotes such as those.
As long as he isn't lying about the condition of a baseball card or lying
about how large a television is, he isn't committing any kind of a crime.
The same thing applies to people who discuss stocks." <<
nytimes.com |
