FACEBOOK & MORGAN STANLEY

This company deserves the "Fresh Steaming Turd" award for 2012!   This esteemed prize comes in non-certificate form and is provided by Chippewa Partners every year to the company that does the best job of fleecing unsuspecting, greedy, gullible, sophisticated investors via Wall Street hustlers.  We usually wait until the end of the year to make the announcement but the summer heat and the billions upon billions of dollars lost in this IPO leads us to believe you couldn't find a company like this in the next few years that is so deserving.  Well, unless it is a soccer company in Manchester but we won't touch that with a vuvuzela!

This year we are also making a duplicate award to some mighty fine salesmen.  This year the award has co-winners.   The first accolades go to the investment bank that duped so many, the venerable Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.  These slick salesmen did more to wipe out equity of so many fine Americans in the Facebook IPO, in fact the losses inflicted pale in comparison to the criminal duo of Sir Alan Stanford and Bernie Madoff.

Our second co-winner is none other than Jon Corzine.   Corzines esteemed accomplishments are as follows:  Only on Wall Street can you bankrupt a company; misplace $1.6 billion of customers’ money; lose 75 percent of shareholders’ money in two weeks; speed dial a high priced criminal attorney and get a court to authorize the payment of your multi-million dollar legal tab from the failed company’s insurance policies; have regulators waive your requirements to take licensing exams required to work in the securities and commodities industry; have your Board of Directors waive your loyalty to the firm; run a bucket shop out of the UK; and still have the word “Honorable” affixed to your name in a Congressional investigations hearing.