Credit the U.S. Treasury with the P.R. job. Its announcement said that JPMorgan’s warrants provided “an additional return to the American taxpayer from Treasury’s investment in the company”.
Additional return. Investment. American Taxpayer. Only Apple Pie and Motherhood were missing from the formal communiqué.
If the “return to U.S. taxpayer” had any meaning, or if the sum involved even matched what Maddoff “investors” are going to get back from the IRS, I would go through the trouble of showing in numbers what this “return” entailed; I know a thing or two about warrants and options.
Still, you can form an informed opinion about the matter from the concluding sentence of the FT article that reported the happy news on its front page:
The Treasury said the price was well above what JPMorgan had offered to buy back the warrants, adding that the auction had been oversubscribed.
The price was well above what JPMorgan had offered. That is called lowballing.
The auction had been oversubscribed. There was nary a word about the buyers, but you could bet your top dollar that they were all professional traders and fund managers. And they were falling over one another to buy the warrants, which is why the auction was oversubscribed.
Bravo, Secretary Geithner – playing one scene of excellent dissembling and letting it look like perfect honor.
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