Yikes, that didn’t take long. We knew last night that Wells and Morgan Stanley were moving ahead with bolstering their capital. They did so in spades today.
Wells had planned to issue $7.5 billion of stock and ended up selling $8.6 billion today. Morgan Stanley (MS) sold $4 billion of equity and raised another $4 billion of debt without government guarantees. I guess that pretty much ends any argument about how investors are looking at the sector.
No doubt that both of these guys want to de-TARP as quickly as possible. As I wrote earlier, they’re all paranoid about Goldman (GS) and JPMorgan (JPM) getting out in front of them.
I am still a little surprised by the reception their debt and equity offerings received. Two months ago the conventional wisdom was that the banks were going to be wards of the state for some time. Now it looks like they’ll be out from under the governments thumb with lightning speed. Was the conventional wisdom as usual wrong or are investors being foolish?
I don’t know. If you have thoughts feel free to leave them.
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