good thesis, bad evidence

Reader comment on: Felix Salmon on 'Wall Street's Dead End'

Submitted by Ajay (United States), Feb 14, 2011 05:28

Actually, his broader thesis rings true, that the public exchanges have been debased into casinos, but his supporting points are all over the place. Funny that it never occurs to him that SarbOx might have raised the threshold for IPOs too high for most of those small companies he now pines for. He must be smoking something if he really thinks Facebook and Twitter want to avoid an IPO. They'd love to go public, with all the dummies who will then pile in, the problem is they'd like to get their revenues up first. Even better if they can sell at those same inflated prices to another company that's already public, thus cashing out and avoiding the accountability of public markets when their silly operations inevitably go bust. That'll be handed off to the idiot CEO who buys them. ;) By the time Felix gets around to making loony claims that it was the retail investor who "improved standards of living and usually kept the worst of corporate abuses in check," it's obvious that all semblance of reality has gone out the window. Were these the same shareholders who kept the recently bankrupt firms like Countrywide or Lehman in check? If anything, the resulting weakened shareholder governance has allowed corporations to make dumber gambles that just waste money and end up wiping out those shareholders. Oh, and Apple should pay out a dividend; trust me, they don't know what to do with that cash pile.


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Other reader comments on this item

Title By Date
Some Emerging Markets are not a mere theme [93 words]StevenFeb 14, 2011 21:32
A cause [28 words]DavidFeb 14, 2011 12:06
market cap as % of GDP [15 words]sbFeb 14, 2011 11:44
⇒ good thesis, bad evidence [245 words]AjayFeb 14, 2011 05:28

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