Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Working Hard For Your $10

Dear Morgan Stanley,

We like you. Well, not in that way, but we are taxpayers. If we didn't like you, why would we give you billions of our money to insure your survival? So we kind of have to like you, same way we like our deviant, foster kids.

Agreed? Let's move on. As a recipient of our generous TARP contribution and FDIC guarantees, we expect you to be active in the capital markets, lend into the economy (you know, that progressively angrier Main Street) and provide liquidity when needed.

Now at this point, from our perch, we don't see much improvement in lending from you, dear deviant child, but we do see non-stop attempts to avoid pay caps and so on. Don't you want to spin of PDT just for that reason? Great! Just making sure we are on the same page...

Let's get back to our favorite pet topic liquidity. You, sweet child of ours, recently advertised about 2x to 3x of SPY volume than the next lucky broker in the hierarchy. As our favorite captain of vertical take off/landing aircraft said yesterday, too big to fail is not a policy, it's a problem. We, the taxpayers, don't want our TARP funds making the problem worse. We want it to get better.

So what was that 10% of SPY volume all about? Was it natural volume? If so, please go ahead and advertise that. We would love to know how your agency business is doing. We want that. Was is PDT trading? In that case this is very troubling. Did you advertise internal prop trading volume? Now that, as you very well know, is kind of creepy.

You know, dear MS, with 10% ADV of SPY volume applied at strategically important time frames you can affect markets? And no, we the taxpayers here at Zero Hedge don't want to see that. We don't want our levered up TARP funds to be used in this way. How about you tell us how much of this 10% of ADV was your customers, how much was ETF desk and in-house props? That will help a lot and avoid any future confusion.

And please keep our $10 that we gave to you in the first place to lend to Main Street, not to bet against anonymous financial blogs... and lose. Sphere: Related Content
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