nah, an ipo is done by prospectus, which invariably say that we ain't makin' any money and we probably never will
in the old days, brokers allocated ipo shares to their best customers and friends, they still do, and always will
as for this whole scumbag conspiracy theory, if idiot bob dole had won in '96, the same stuff would have happened except we'd have burned more ethanol in the process
it was all part of a great once-in-our-lifetime mania, with the icing on the cake being the dot-bomb "new economy", and it didn't matter who was sitting in the oval office or using the sink
g.e. has been "managing" their earnings for over 20 years and microsoft for almost as long
aggressive accounting ala andersen is a concept almost as old as prostitution
tino de angelis (remember the great salad oil swindle?) would be proud
heck, he probably is, i think he's still alive
AAMOF, I did hear about good ol' Tino's swindle. The Washington Post in February, did a backstory after Enron went belly-up. Tino, Ponzi and Boesky were mentioned as great fraudsters.
Boesky of "greed is good" fame was guilty of "parking" stocks among other things. Ponzi used the pyramid method using late investors to pay early investors. But Tino was a real "pro." The guy fooled people into thinking he had all this salad oil. He had fake reservoirs built into huge tanks, so that when inspectors there to certify his holdings inserted their yardsticks, the fake reservoirs showed oil, but the tanks held mostly water. Tino bankrupted a couple of large brokerage houses speculating on oil futures.
The grand-daddy of frauds was Equity Funding. As the WSJ reported: "The customers didn't exist. Their mutual fund shares didn't exist. The funded loans didn't exist. The phony customers' phony pledges of their phony fund shares to buy phony insurance ultimately became numbers on a computer tape, which then printed out phony assets for Equity Funding Corporation's phony books."
Book-cooking at its most egregious.