How the Game is Played, IPO Division

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Back when I used to work for a living, I often wondered why investment banks all charged 7% fees for managing IPOs. Why wasn’t there more competition among bankers? Why didn’t some sharp IPO operators at Goldman or Morgan Stanley head off to start up a boutique firm that snagged high-quality business with slightly lower fees? What happened to the free market?

Well, now we know the answer: because there’s widespread collusion on Wall Street. Felix Salmon summarizes the damning evidence here.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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