I need to crank out as much of the work I get paid for as I can this weekend, in case Frankenstorm knocks out the power. But here are some links to other stuff —
Righties have come up with a new excuse for being outraged over Benghazi. John Cole smacks them down.
Charles Blow argues that we know Romney by the company he keeps.
Remembering the time Mittens lied under oath.
Good segment from last night’s Maddow:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Another video:
Add this to maha’s great list:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/10/25/a-fan-letter-to-certain-conservative-politicians/
It’s a rapist’s fan letter to Conservative politicians.
Loved the Rachel clip. That “who cares?” look on Trump’s face was priceless. Glad there’s someone like Rachel to point it out.
Off topic: Sheldon Adelson has contributed 54 million to the Republicans — mostly to Romney this cycle. Thanks to Citizens United, a gangster can have that much influence.
Hopefully, that will be money down the toilet for him. He should just pay his fair share of taxes (and let Israel solve their own problems).
As to Romney’s testimony on Staples —
A 10-to-1 run-up in a company in the year before it goes public is not so unheard-of as to make a case that the person talking about is covering something up. If company is good, it ought to have a major run-up. First-year econ says the value goes up when there’s a reliable market for selling the stuff, and in this case Econ 100 is right.
And the company had in fact sold stock in itself some months before the settlement, at a price not greatly different from the one the Mrs got when she sold. And Mitt was speaking truth, oddly enough, when he said that preferred stock (sold in the first transaction) is valued more highly than common (sold in the disputed ones).
But all that aside, the factor of 10 is absolutely phony! Between her cheap sales at $2.50 or so and the public offering of the stock, two things happened:
1. A year passed, a very significant time in a fast-growing company.
2. There was a reverse split of 1 for 3. Each 3 shares that existed when she sold so cheap were replaced by 1 share of new stock. The shares she sold at $2.50, and only a year later she could have got $22.50? Those shares never existed. *Three* of her old shares could have been sold for $22.50, packaged as one share. In finance language, the adjusted post-split basis was $7.50. Makes the price increase rather less amazing, no?
To publish the numbers as the Globe published them is journalistic malfeasance — a stronger term, I hope, than malpractice. Possibly not with malice aforethought, though: There is, after, all, no rule that people who write about finance and economics must know at least as much as the average sports writer knows about baseball. We may wish, with Brad DeLong, that it were so; but it is not.
Oh BTW, why mess with the prices by splitting the stock? There are very deep-rooted beliefs in the the finance biz about the sort of price at which a stock should be offered. That sort of thing is self-fulfilling, and no one would dare to bring a stock out at a price below maybe 10, unless the idea was to say “This is a cheapo offering of a cheap little company.”
Source for this financial info: I was there, on the inside, in a split and public offering. Fortunately, it was in a better company, which split its stock to *increase* the number of shares, decreasing the price, before selling. Hence, the shares that I sold at a price X in our respectable offering had not cost me the $1 that I paid when I bought in, but 33 cents or something adjusted for the split. When your own money is involved, you get very interested in what your real profit was. But *that* run-up tokk a whole 3 years.