Are They Kidding?
Aug 28th, 2006 at 9:06 am by Susie
Or are they really that dumb?
The boom in corporate mergers is creating concern that illicit trading ahead of deal announcements is becoming a systemic problem.
An analysis of the nation’s biggest mergers over the last 12 months indicates that the securities of 41 percent of the companies receiving buyout bids showed abnormal and suspicious trading in the days and weeks before those deals became public.
There can be many reasons for unusual trading in advance of a deal, many of them perfectly innocuous. But the study, conducted for The New York Times by Measuredmarkets Inc., an analytical research firm in Toronto, identified companies from a wide range of industries whose pre-merger trading activity was not easily explained by corporate announcements or mentions in the media.
Is the New York Times really that naive? Do they really believe the public wristslappings that took place after the Enron and WorldCom scandals hit put an end to the economic raping and pillaging that marks the Bush era?
Not so’s I’d notice.
