LG, yes, IPO manipulation was yet another huge source of deceit, and lots of people got hurt.
from the article:
"Systemic manipulation by some of Wall Street's most respected firms, they say, may have fueled those eye-popping IPOs as much as investors' infatuation with the profitless pioneers of the new economy. "This was one of the great greed drives of history," says Jeff Bronchick, chief investment officer at money management firm Reed Connor & Birdwell in Los Angeles, who as a rule doesn't buy IPOs. "People stepped on a lot of kids to get to the fire exits, to get money. The blame game is bull, because everyone was in on it. But if you break the law and there's a record of it, you deserve to get punished."
..."filed a far-reaching lawsuit alleging that seven large securities underwriters -- among them Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley -- colluded in an attempt to manipulate prices on hot IPOs and boost their gains. In their complaint, Lovell and Sirota charge that their dozen or so nightingales, all of them important clients of the defendant firms, were told -- in conversations never publicly disclosed -- that the only way they could obtain precious shares in sizzling IPOs like those of Ariba, Marimba, and UPS was to agree to remit as much as a third of their gains to the underwriters." |
