Twitter Inc.'s been spinning quite a turnaround story in the press lately. The microblogging service "has finally turned a corner," declares the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. "It's a juggernaut," a company executive tells the magazine. But the hard numbers we've been provided paint a very different story.
Facebook will file to go public tomorrow, in case you missed the rolling thunder bombardment of news articles this week, or in the months preceding. There won't be the faintest reason for the average person to care about this IPO until shares actually start selling months from now, but in the meantime you should steel yourself for endless breathless hype pandemonium. Oh, it's going to be awful.
Now and then, we get forwarded crazy emails that people — most of whom are men involved in the finance industry — send to the people they're dating, or have dated, or want to date. Today: a thesaurus-happy hedge-fund manager accuses a woman he's been on one date with of lying to him and decides he'll teach her the best way to reject someone.
Mitt Romney has had five or six years to formulate his response to a full onslaught on his record as corporate efficiency dweeb at Bain Capital, and here's what he's come up with: YOU PEOPLE ARE JEALOUS. Stop it. Go away!
No surprise here. Top Republicans are ripping President Obama's decision to recess appoint his top consumer watchdog, Richard Cordray.
A well-placed mole has forwarded us the Silicon Valley equivalent of hard-core pornography: an explicit look at Facebook's finances. They're even more staggering than we expected. A gusher of profits has left the social network with a cash hoard to rival established companies like 3M, eBay and Yahoo.
ZOMG, Justin Bieber is trending! How can we short the Jonas Brothers?? That, apparently, is the sort of conversation that's becoming more and more plausible on Wall Street; hedge funds are increasingly turning to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube trends to place social media driven bets in the "tens of billions of dollars," according to a company that sells them data.
Ubiquitous GOP "message guru" Frank Luntz is the guy who teaches Republicans how to kill things. When Democrats introduce a bill and Republicans decide that they'd like to kill it, for sport, they ask Luntz to come up with a couple of phrases to reiterate hundreds of times a day, so as to terrify the American people.
There was a flurry of interest in Groupon's stock just before the IPO, driving up the price a bit. But Wall Street's crush on the online discounter was short-lived: Its stock plummeted today, for the second time in a month. Maybe reason will actually prevail in tech investing, just this once.
Hey! Billionaires have feelings, too, you know. Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone took to CNBC this morning to defend their honor from that bully Barack Obama, who is killing the economy by refusing to literally dance for them while holding pom-poms made of shredded cash: "We need leadership, we need cheerleading, we need encouragement. Businessmen and fat cats need to feel like they're doing something good not that they're villains and not that their criminals."
Two senators introduced legislation to help Facebook further evade a 47-year-old SEC disclosure rule and take on a slew of new investors. Because that's the problem in America lately, you see: Corporations are too well regulated, and we know too much about the inner workings of large, heavily capitalized institutions.
As part of the new Basel III financial regulatory standards, certain banks deemed "systemically important" will be required to maintain higher core capital ratios, draw up plans for their own hypothetical unwinding, and keep a certain amount of highly liquid assets on hand lest another crunch come around. You can probably guess many of the banks that these rule-writers had in mind! But for good measure, the official list of 29 banks has been released.
Groupon goes public tomorrow, and the financially frightful coupon startup should be a stock market hit: With about 10 times more prospective buyer than shares, the stock priced today at $20, up from an expected $16 - $18. So it looks like the tech bubble, inflated heretofore by private investment deals, is going public. How exciting.
