Every "Initial Public Offering" of stuck in a public corporation involves one or more banks who help the company 'arrange' the deal.
During the first Tech bubble in the 1990s, the main players were Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others. That collapsed in a haze of fraud and dishonesty. Then 9/11 came, then the CDO/mortgage ponzi scheme came, and the CLO/buyout scam, and the Auction Rate Securities scam, but then that bubble burst too. It took out Bear and Merrill and almost took out Morgan. But it didn't take out the idea of big megabanking. And megabanking requires megaprofits. With CDOs dead, what could they do? They started dabbling in commodites, like wheat, oil, and metals. They are making new derivatives, like Catastrophe Bonds and Mortality Swaps, in which they can profit off of death and disasters. But those things only make so much profit.
So, they are going back to an old standby, the IPO. Every time a company does an IPO, the bank doing the 'bookrunning' makes a huge fee. This time it is the 'social media' IPO, not the 'tech IPO'. . So, who was 'bookrunning' Linkedin's IPO?
Morgan Stanley & Co
BofA Merrill Lynch
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC.
Allen & Company LLC
UBS Securities LLC
Ah yes. Morgan Stanley, which came a hair's breadth away from being bankrupt in 2008, if it hadn't been for a Japanese bank that bailed them out at the last minute. But they also had massive quantities of toxic assets that we, the taxpayer, were kind enough to take off their hands.
BofA Merrill Lynch. That's funny. It used to be Merrill Lynch, until we, the taxpayers, forced Bank of America to buy it in 2008, and then fired Bank of America's CEO, and then bailed out Bank of America with several billion dollars.
JP Morgan. That company that swallowed Bear Stearns in 2008, because, again, we, the taxpayers, helped them do it.
Allen & Company - I have no idea who they are, nor do I want to. Every time I research a financial organization I wind up crying.
UBS - Another big CDO player . When we bailed out AIG, we taxpayers bailed out every big investment bank that was full of CDOs, including foreign banks like UBS.
UBS is pretty interesting. It used to be a financier of Hitler. Back in the late 1990s they were shredding records of Jewish property they had stolen during the Nazi Regime. There was a night security guard, Christoph Meili, who caught them doing this and smuggled some documents away, and gave them to Jewish group. This was rather inconvenient for UBS, as the United States and the European governments were, at the time, in negotiations for the London Conference on Nazi Gold. You see the Swiss banks had decided to keep the money of dead Jews instead of giving it back to their relatives after the holocaust. Anyways. Christoph Meili became rather disfavored by UBS, and they had the Swiss authorities try to put him in prison. He escaped to the US, and was granted political asylum. He returned to Switzerland about 10 years later.
There is another UBS whistleblower. He was put in prison. His name is Bradley Birkenfeld and he that a huge number of extremely rich people have been cheating on their US taxes. UBS's answer to this was to have Birkenfeld arrested. Now he will be in prison for 3 years in prison, in the United States.
Anyways. Our tax dollars at work.
References
Linkedin IPO Linkedin.com
Christoph Meili returns – as hero or villain? 2009 April 9, swissinfo.ch
UBS Whistleblower Gets Rewarded With Prison Time:Ann Woolner, August 25, 2009, Bloomberg.com
Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, Stuart Eizenstat , 2003, PublicAffairs