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Banking, finance, and taxes

Cuomo Crushes Morgan Stanley (MS)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

Cammonopoly_wideweb__430x3250Morgan Stanley (MS) thought it could pull a "monkey see, monkey do" act with NY State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. The investment house offered to buy back $4.5 billion in auction-rate securities using much the same system that Merrill Lynch (MER), Citigroup (C), and UBS (UBS) used to settle their differences with the government.

Cuomo would have none of it.

According to the FT, A spokesman for Andrew Cuomo, New York attorney-general, said the Morgan Stanley offer was “too little, too late’ and added: “Our investigation into Morgan Stanley continues.”

While it is fine for Cuomo to get a piece of the thugs who sold the auction-rate securities on false pretenses, he now risks pointlessly damaging the investors in firms like Morgan Stanley.The investment bank’s shares have recovered most of what they lost in early July. Cuomo can make sure that the stock price rebound is arrested.

But, what does the Attorney General gain by pounding the Morgan Stanley shareholders?

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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