By Patrick Clark 6/01/12 7:25am

Morning Read

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Morgan Stanley Boss Gorman Has No Sympathy for You or Anyone Else Looking for a Facebook Pop: Wall Street Roundup

Naive! Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has no sympathy for Facebook investors who expected to profit from a first-day spike in share prices. “People who thought they were buying this stock so they could get an enormous pop were both naive and ordered under the wrong pretenses,” Mr. Gorman said yesterday in an interview with CNBC. To which he might have added: “Didn’t they read Devitt’s research?” Mr. Gorman, of course, had this to say in January to investment bankers upset over Morgan Stanley pay cuts: “You’re naive, read the newspaper.“ Read More

By Patrick Clark 5/31/12 8:01am

Morning Read

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Citi’s Country-Bred Banker Blows $31 Million-Whistle; The Pain in Spain: Wall Street Roundup

Citi’s country-bred whistle-blower: Sherry Hunt started her career in the mortgage business as a 17-year-old mom processing home loans in Alaska. By the age of 55, Ms. Hunt was supervising 65 loan officers in Citigroup’s mortgage unit. The year was 2004, and business was booming. Citi was buying loans from outside lenders that had been secured with phony documents, and Ms. Hunt’s reports highlighting defective loans were being buried. The housing bubble popped, of course, and Citi took $45 billion in Federal bailouts. That didn’t stop the bank from processing defective loans. In 2011, a supervisor told Ms. Hunt and a colleague that if the number of loans being classified as defective didn’t fall, it would be “your asses on the line.” The country girl turned banking executive didn’t back down. In the spirit of all great Americans, she went to court. Bob Ivry goes there too, profiling Ms. Hunt, who would ultimately win $31 million in a whistle-blower suit against the banking giant, in July’s Bloomberg Markets magazine. Read More

By Patrick Clark 10:02am

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Blodget

Henry Blodget Says Flap Over Morgan Stanley’s Facebook Research Is All About…Henry Blodget?

Henry Blodget, BusinessInsider aggregator-in-chief, disgraced Merrill Lynch analyst and the pundit who spent the weeks leading up to the Facebook IPO hammering on what were at face incongruous themes—overpriced Facebook stock was “muppet-bait” and Mark Zuckerberg was the greatest—is out with a new Facebook trope that’s Internet fantastic:

The ongoing controversy Read More

By Patrick Clark 5/24/12 7:30am

Morning Read

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NYSE Courts Facebook, Plaintiffs Circle IPO, Buffett’s Goldman Banker: Wall Street Roundup

While Facebook dominated the news, Warren Buffett’s secretive investment banker slipped into a New York courthouse. That and more in today’s Wall Street roundup.

Falling out? NYSE Euronext approached Facebook yesterday about listing the company’s stock on the New York Stock Exchange, a move which would be a bigger blow to Nasdaq than any punishment regulators dole out for bungling the first day in Facebook trading. Read More

By Patrick Clark 5/22/12 9:00am

Faceplant

ZUCK

Dispatch from the Aftermath of the Facebook IPO

In the days before the Facebook hysteria had fully bloomed, we sought comment from investors who planned to buy the stock. Did they know half of Twitter was bashing Facebook as massively overpriced? Were they chasing the next Google? Did they just like Zuck?

Yesterday we finally caught up with a Facebook investor. Alper Aydinoglu Read More