/3
In 2017, Snap Inc. went public by selling non-voting stock; only founders and insiders would get any votes at all. Investors complained, and also bought the stock, because they didn’t want to miss out on a hot initial public offering. (It’s down more than 40% since its IPO, oops.) But then some index providers — FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones — changed their rules to exclude or limit dual-class stocks from many of their indexes. The investors had solved their collective action problem; they had found a way to impose economic penalties on companies with dual-class stock.
It didn’t work. Companies kept going public with dual-class stock. They didn’t care that much about missing out on the indexes; their founders were willing to pay the economic price to keep control. (In particular, companies don’t generally get added to the S&P 500 the day they go public; a lot of index demand is not for shares in the IPO but later on, meaning that it doesn’t directly affect the IPO price.) This means that the investors’ solution ended up being bad for them: They credibly committed to not buying dual-class stock of hot companies, hot companies kept going public with dual-class stock, index funds couldn’t buy those stocks, and they were sad.
The solution was to give up. Last week S&P Dow Jones announced that dual-class stocks are fine again: “Effective April 17, 2023, all companies with multiple share class structures will be considered eligible candidates for addition to the S&P Composite 1500 and its component indices,” including the S&P 500. Here’s a Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP client memo from last week:
In response to Snap Inc.’s IPO in which only non-voting shares were offered to the public, the Council of Institutional Investors and others had lobbied the major index providers to bar non-voting shares from their indices, arguing that absent this change, passive investors such as index funds would be forced to invest in non-voting shares that erode public company governance. As a result, since July 31, 2017, S&P Dow Jones has excluded companies with multiple share classes from the indices comprising the S&P Composite 1500.
The decision to revisit index eligibility criteria comes after a consultation process that S&P Dow Jones ran with market participants from October to December 2022.
In 2017, investors noisily complained that they were being forced to buy dual-class stocks, so S&P kicked the dual-class stocks out of the indexes. In 2022, investors noisily complained that they were being forced not to buy dual-class stocks, so S&P let them back in.
Oil rigging
I loved Liam Vaughan’s and Lucia Kassai’s Bloomberg Businessweek story last week about corruption in Venezuelan oil auctions, in part because it is two almost entirely separate stories of corruption. For starters, there are the Venezuelan oil auctions. Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, would sell various oil products in auctions, and big oil trading firms would hire a consulting firm named Helsinge, run by a guy named Francisco Morillo, to help them win the auctions. The way he allegedly helped them win was (1) he bribed PDVSA insiders to tell him about the other bids, (2) he shared those bids with his clients, (3) the clients topped those bids by a penny and (4) they paid him enough to cover the bribes with some profit for himself:
In one series of chats from March 14, 2006, Morillo, using the screen name George White, guided three prominent commodity traders—Maarraoui at Vitol, Gustavo Gabaldon at Glencore and Maximiliano Poveda at Trafigura—through auctions for fuel oil and a product called vacuum gas oil, which is used to make gasoline. At 9:51 a.m., nine minutes before the offers were due, Morillo shared details of the bids PDVSA had received for the vacuum gas oil—information PDVSA says is supposed to be confidential. Five minutes later he informed the three traders, via separate chats, of a late bid for the fuel oil.
The traders didn’t enter every auction, but when they did bid, the information Morillo had provided let them know at what price to do so. On March 20, 2006, after learning about offers from BP Plc and two other companies, Maarraoui placed a bid to buy gas oil at 0.8¢ per gallon more than the next-highest bidder. Two days later, Poveda won a liquefied petroleum gas auction after being told about two rival offers and besting them by a cent.
These conversations, a handful among thousands, demonstrate how valuable Helsinge’s service was to its customers—and how potentially devastating it was to the Venezuelan people. If Morillo’s clients had been forced to enter the market blind, they likely would have placed some bids at $5 or $10 per metric ton higher than they needed to, as the chats show their competitors did. Instead the traders were able to win auctions they entered by a dollar or less, saving as much as $1.5 million on a typical 150,000-ton cargo. According to the Boies complaint, they’d pay Helsinge about $300,000 on a shipment of that size. PDVSA declined to provide data to Businessweek on the outcome of its auctions, or to comment for this story, but given that the company conducted dozens of auctions each month as buyer and seller, and that Helsinge was in business for 15 years, it’s conceivable Venezuela lost out on several billion this way.
Also, if you keep doing this, eventually you’re going to drive everyone else out of the auctions, further depressing prices:
Traders from two oil companies told Businessweek that they’d stopped participating in PDVSA’s auctions because they were sick of losing to the same players. “Putting together an offer takes time. You need to figure out the economics, freight, insurance, the hedge, then submit to your compliance, get signatures from God knows who before you’re able to submit a number,” says one of the individuals, who asked not to be identified. “After a while we just gave up. It became clear to us that something funny was happening.”
This part of the story includes some classics of the “don’t put it in writing” and “don’t refer to bribes by cutesy nicknames” genres:
As well as routinely passing along information, [PDVSA commercial and supply unit manager Rene] Hecker talked to Morillo about the need to encrypt their conversations and about an offshore company he’d set up in Panama. In one message, Hecker sent Morillo banking information for his father-in-law, known as Gigante, writing in the subject line, “chamo elimina estos archivos despues please” (“dude delete these files later please”). Before Christmas 2004, Gigante received two payments totaling $400,000, Morillo’s bank statements show.
/3

/2
I said above that the few hundred million dollars that Bed Bath raised by selling 622 million shares of stock since it started preparing for bankruptcy “was not enough” to solve its problems, but it’s actually a bit worse than that. Bed Bath’s bankruptcy filing tells a story in which the company got into a bad place due to a combination of pandemic/supply-chain issues and its own management mistakes; in particular, its former chief executive officer pushed private-label brands instead of the well-known brands that its customers wanted. Bed Bath realized its mistakes and began correcting them — that CEO “was excused on June 29, 2022” — but that takes money; “the Company needed real runway to turn around its inventory and liquidity position.”
But the story is not that it then went out and raised several hundred million dollars to build up its inventory and make its business more attractive. No, the story is that it went out and raised several hundred million dollars to hand directly to its creditors:
Unfortunately, under the terms of the Second Amended Credit Agreement, the Debtors were required to use the net proceeds from the initial closing of the [Hudson Bay] Offering, along with the FILO Upsize, to repay outstanding revolving loans under the Debtors’ Prepetition ABL Facility, including repayment of the nearly $200 million overadvance. At this point the Company’s sales had dropped 60% on a comparable store basis, resulting in substantial ongoing losses from operation; therefore, the remaining Offering proceeds went to cover operational losses rather than to restoring inventory levels. …
The net proceeds from the B. Riley ATM Program were used to prepay outstanding revolving loans under the Debtors’ Prepetition ABL Facility and cash collateralize outstanding letters of credit, resulting in new credit under the Debtors’ Prepetition ABL Facility. ...
The Debtors’ cash burn continued while sales further declined due to lack of incoming merchandise, thus, preventing the Debtors from implementing their anticipated long-term operational restructuring while satisfying their restrictive debt obligations.
That is, Bed Bath had an asset-based lending facility (its most senior debt) and a first-in-last-out term loan (effectively its second-most-senior debt); as of November 2022, it had borrowed $550 million on the ABL (plus $186.2 million of letters of credit) and $375 million on the FILO. As of Sunday there was $80.3 million outstanding on the ABL (plus $102.6 million of letters of credit) and $547.1 million outstanding on the FILO.[3] Since this all began, Bed Bath has raised a bit more than $400 million from shareholders and handed about $300 million of it directly to its lenders, while the business collapsed and it had no money to fix things. Now it will hand the rest of its money over to the lenders.
I don’t know what to say? All of this was quite well disclosed. Back when Bed Bath did the Hudson Bay deal in January, it said in the prospectus that it intended to use all the money it raised to repay debt, and that if it didn’t raise a billion dollars in that deal (it did not) then it “would not have the financial resources to satisfy its payment obligations,” it “will likely file for bankruptcy protection,” “its assets will likely be liquidated” and “our equity holders would likely not receive any recovery at all in a bankruptcy scenario.” All of the legal documents were pretty clear that Bed Bath was raising money by selling stock to retail investors, that it was handing that money directly to its creditors, that the money probably wouldn’t be enough, that Bed Bath was probably going bankrupt, and that when it did the stock that it had just sold to those retail investors would be worthless. And things have worked out exactly as promised. No one can be surprised!
And yet it is one of the most astonishing corporate finance transactions I’ve ever seen?[4] The basic rules of bankruptcy are:
When a company is bankrupt, the shareholders get zero dollars back, and the creditors get whatever’s left.
The shareholders don’t get less than zero. They don’t put more money in.[5]
Here, I mean, Bed Bath was kind of like “hey everyone, we went bust, sorry, but our lenders are such nice people and they could really use a break, we’re gonna pass the hat and it would be great if you could throw in a few hundred million dollars to make them feel better.” And the retail shareholders did! With more or less complete disclosure, they bought 622 million shares of a stock that (1) was pretty clearly going to be worthless and (2) now is worthless,[6] so that Bed Bath could have more money to give to its lenders when it inevitably liquidated.
I have over the past few years been impressed by AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.’s commitment to the meme-stock bit. In particular, AMC’s management was early and aggressive in realizing that being a meme stock could be a tool of corporate finance, that when people on Reddit are bidding up your stock for no clear reason, the correct reaction is not to chuckle in disbelief but to sell them stock. But AMC at least has a story; AMC is using its meme investors’ money to pay down debt, sure, but also to keep its theaters open and buy a gold mine.
No, this is the peak of meme stocks. Bed Bath & Beyond sold 50 million shares a week for three months with, as far as I can tell, no story, no plan, nothing but “a troubled financial situation and nostalgia value.”[7] Bed Bath saw that its retail shareholders wanted to throw their money away, and that its sophisticated lenders wanted to get their money back, and realized that there was a trade to be done that would make everyone, temporarily, happy. So it did the trade. It’s amazing. The lawsuits are gonna be great.
Dual-class stock
Most investors would prefer not to have dual-class stock. If a company has two classes of common stock, one of which has a lot of votes and is held by the founders and the other one of which has fewer votes and is sold to the public, then that’s bad, for you, as a big public shareholder. If you’re buying 5% of a company you’d like to get 5% of the votes, so that if you get dissatisfied with management you can push for change and they’ll have to listen to you.
But it can be a little hard to insist on this preference. Most of the time, if things work out well or even adequately, your voting rights just won’t matter very much. If some hot tech company is looking to go public with dual-class stock so that its visionary founder can keep control forever, and you like the visionary founder, you will want to own the stock even with no voting rights, and if you insist on voting rights, the visionary founder can say “well I don’t need your money anyway, lots of other people want to invest.” There is a collective action problem: Most investors would like voting rights, but it’s not at the top of their list, so anyone who refuses to buy dual-class stock will end up missing out on a lot of hot deals.
This means that, if you are a visionary founder looking to go public, there’s not much downside to having dual-class stock. “Investors won’t like it,” your bankers will tell you, and you will ask “well how much less will they pay for the stock if it’s dual-class,” and the bankers will be forced to reply “well they’ll pay the same price but they’ll grumble about it to the press.” Who cares? If there is no visible economic penalty for having dual-class stock, lots of founders will want it.
There is, however, at least one way for investors to act collectively to address this problem. Sort of. Companies, and founders, want to be in stock indexes, because there is a lot of money there: Trillions of dollars are managed in indexed strategies, and trillions more are in funds that are benchmarked to indexes and tend to invest in companies in indexes. So there is an economic penalty for companies that are not eligible for the indexes. And index eligibility rules are set by index providers like S&P Dow Jones Indices and FTSE Russell. Those companies can change their rules if they want. Those companies’ clients are investment managers who use their indexes. And the index eligibility rules are, to some extent, a matter of customer service and marketing: Index rules are not just about the abstract pursuit of truth (“What does it mean to be a large-cap company in Europe, the Middle East and Africa? How do we make sure all of those companies are in our index?”), but also about providing a useful product for your customers (“What list of large-cap EMEA companies do large-cap EMEA index fund managers feel like they should invest in?”).
And so if all the investment managers hate dual-class stock, they can quietly call up the index providers and say “hey it would be helpful for us if you ban dual-class stocks from the index, because then none of us could buy them and our collective action problem would be solved.”
/2

hope that anyone interested saw this earlier and similar stomach-turning MLevine writeup, "Money Stuff: Bed Bath Moves Into the Beyond" ...
somehow like an inverse of naked shorting
or something
\\\ Beyond bloodbath
On Jan. 20, Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. had about 117.3 million shares of common stock outstanding; the stock closed that day at $3.35 per share. On March 27, it had about 428.1 million shares outstanding, at $0.7881 each. On April 10, it had 558.7 million shares outstanding, at $0.2961 each. Yesterday, April 23, when it filed for bankruptcy, it had 739,056,836 shares outstanding.[1] The stock closed at $0.2935 on Friday.
So in the last two weeks, Bed Bath & Beyond has sold about 180 million shares to retail investors, more shares than it had outstanding in January. The stock averaged about $0.31 per share over those two weeks, meaning that the company raised maybe $55 million, in those two weeks, as it has been sliding into bankruptcy. Since January, Bed Bath & Beyond has sold about 622 million shares, or almost 50 million shares a week, raising a few hundred million dollars.
Here is Bed Bath’s first-day declaration in the bankruptcy case, which describes what the company has been up to over the last few months. The points that I would highlight are:
In December 2022, “Bed Bath & Beyond triggered multiple events of defaults under its financing facilities” and began its slow move into bankruptcy.
Also in December 2022, its financial advisers at Lazard “commenced a process to solicit interest in a going-concern sale transaction that could be effectuated in chapter 11,” that is, to find someone who was interested in buying the company out of bankruptcy and continuing to operate its business.
They failed: By mid-January, “Lazard had engaged with approximately 60 potential investors to solicit interest in serving as a plan sponsor, acquiring some or all of the Debtors’ assets or businesses, or providing postpetition financing,” but “to date, the Company has been yet to identify an executable transaction.”
So, as of mid-January, it seems that the company’s plan was to file for bankruptcy, close all its stores, liquidate its inventory and hand whatever cash was left to its creditors.
But Bed Bath did have one thing going for it. It was “part of the ‘meme-stock’ movement started and fueled on Reddit boards and social media websites,” because it “checked the two boxes needed to become a meme-stock: (i) a troubled financial situation and (ii) nostalgia value.”[2]
So someone had the bright idea of delaying things for a bit by selling tons and tons of stock to Bed Bath’s retail shareholders at whatever prices they’d pay. “Certain third-party investors expressed interest in providing the Debtors with substantial equity financing in light of the Company’s depressed share price and continued trading volatility. More specifically, the Debtors were approached by Hudson Bay Capital Management, LP” about a weird stock deal that we discussed in January; this ended up raising about $360 million. After the Hudson Bay deal ran its course — basically, after Hudson Bay and Bed Bath drove the stock price from above $3 to below $1 by pounding out about 311 million shares to retail investors — Bed Bath and its brokers at B. Riley Securities Inc. sold another 311 million shares to retail investors, but at ever-declining prices, so they raised a lot less money. Still something, though.
It was not enough, though, and ultimately this weekend Bed Bath & Beyond filed for exactly the sort of bankruptcy it was contemplating in January: Close all the stores, liquidate the inventory, hand whatever cash is left to the creditors. “The Debtors are committed to achieving the highest or otherwise best bid for some or all of the Debtors’ assets by marketing their assets pursuant to the Bidding Procedures, and, if necessary, conducting an auction for any of their assets,” the company says, but it has had like four months to find someone interested in buying the business, and if no one has shown up yet no one is going to. And: “The Debtors estimate that the aggregate net sales proceeds from all Sales will be approximately $718 million,” against about $1.8 billion of debt to pay off. Nonetheless:
While the commencement of a full chain wind-down is necessitated by economic realities, Bed Bath & Beyond has and will continue to market their businesses as a going-concern, including the buybuy Baby business. Bed Bath & Beyond has pulled off long shot transactions several times in the last six months, so nobody should think Bed Bath & Beyond will not be able to do so again. To the contrary, Bed Bath & Beyond and its professionals will make every effort to salvage all or a portion of operations for the benefit of all stakeholders.
/1

"Mr. Ballou is an attorney and the author of the forthcoming 'Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America,' from which this essay is adapted."
Not to be confused with: "Financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson explain[ing] how private equity firms buy out companies, then lay off employees and cut costs in order to expand profits. Her new book is These are the Plunderers."
Fresh Air interview with Gretchen Morgenson, April 26th, transcript and audio:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172164997/how-private-equity-firms-are-widening-the-income-gap-in-the-u-s
Morgenson's book was released one week before Ballou's. Curious timing and similarity of titles. Both authors use the same ManorCare example in their excerpt/interview.
If the MOs of these firms sound familiar, there's a reason. It's a rebranding. Morgenson says: "Private equity firms are what used to be called leveraged buyout funds and firms". Yes, it's still going on, and has been going on for decades.
The revolving door that Ballou describes in the excerpt quoted swings both ways. It's not just PEFs hiring " former chiefs of staff, counsels and legislative directors".

Gross: [Trump] appointed Jay Powell to head the Federal Reserve. What's Jay Powell's connection to PEFs?
Morgenson: Jay Powell was an executive - a high-ranking executive at the Carlyle Group in Washington for several years. So he definitely has, you know, the mindset of private equity. Donald Trump also had, as a very high-level adviser to him, Steve Schwarzman, who is the co-founder of the Blackstone Group. You would often see Steve at Donald Trump's, you know, right or left hand when they were having meetings about business. So, you know, these firms do have a lot of clout and power in Washington.

Kind of astonishing this kind of stuff is still going on: https://nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html#commentsContainer
An excerpt:

Companies bought by private equity firms are far more likely to go bankrupt than companies that aren’t. Over the last decade, private equity firms were responsible for nearly 600,000 job losses in the retail sector alone. In nursing homes, where the firms have been particularly active, private equity ownership is responsible for an estimated — and astounding — 20,000 premature deaths over a 12-year period, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Similar tales of woe abound in mobile homes, prison health care, emergency medicine, ambulances, apartment buildings and elsewhere. Yet private equity and its leaders continue to prosper, and executives of the top firms are billionaires many times over.
Why do private equity firms succeed when the companies they buy so often fail? In part, it’s because firms are generally insulated from the consequences of their actions, and benefit from hard-fought tax benefits that allow many of their executives to often pay lower rates than you and I do. Together, this means that firms enjoy disproportionate benefits when their plans succeed, and suffer fewer consequences when they fail.
Consider the case of the Carlyle Group and the nursing home chain HCR ManorCare. In 2007, Carlyle — a private equity firm now with $373 billion in assets under management — bought HCR ManorCare for a little over $6 billion, most of which was borrowed money that ManorCare, not Carlyle, would have to pay back. As the new owner, Carlyle sold nearly all of ManorCare’s real estate and quickly recovered its initial investment. This meant, however, that ManorCare was forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars a year in rent to occupy buildings it once owned. Carlyle also extracted over $80 million in transaction and advisory fees from the company it had just bought, draining ManorCare of money.
ManorCare soon instituted various cost-cutting programs and laid off hundreds of workers. Health code violations spiked. People suffered. The daughter of one resident told The Washington Post that “my mom would call us every day crying when she was in there” and that “it was dirty — like a run-down motel. Roaches and ants all over the place.”
In 2018, ManorCare filed for bankruptcy, with over $7 billion in debt. But that was, in a sense, immaterial to Carlyle, which had already recovered the money it invested and made millions more in fees. (In statements to The Washington Post, ManorCare denied that the quality of its care had declined, while Carlyle claimed that changes in how Medicare paid nursing homes, not its own actions, caused the chain’s bankruptcy.)
Carlyle managed to avoid any legal liability for its actions. How it did so explains why this industry often has such poor outcomes for the businesses it buys.
The family of one ManorCare resident, Annie Salley, sued Carlyle after she died in a facility that the family said was understaffed. According to the lawsuit, despite needing assistance walking to the bathroom, Ms. Salley was forced to do so alone, and hit her head on a bathroom fixture. Afterward, nursing home staff reportedly failed to order a head scan or refer her to a doctor, even though she exhibited confusion, vomited and thrashed around. Ms. Salley eventually died from bleeding around her brain.
Yet when Ms. Salley’s family sued for wrongful death, Carlyle managed to get the case against it dismissed. As a private equity firm, Carlyle claimed, it did not technically own ManorCare. Rather, Carlyle merely advised a series of investment funds with obscure names that did. In essence, Carlyle performed a legal disappearing act.
In this case, as in nearly every private equity acquisition, private equity firms benefit from a legal double standard: They have effective control over the companies their funds buy, but are rarely held responsible for those companies’ actions. This mismatch helps to explain why private equity firms often make such risky or shortsighted moves that imperil their own businesses. When firms, through their takeovers, load companies up with debt, extract onerous fees or cut jobs or quality of care, they face big payouts when things go well, but generally suffer no legal consequences when they go poorly. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” sort of arrangement — one that’s been enormously profitable.
But it isn’t just that firms benefit from the law: They take great pains to shape it, too. Since 1990, private equity and investment firms have given over $900 million to federal candidates and have hired an untold number of senior government officials to work on their behalf. These have included cabinet members, speakers of the House, generals, a C.I.A. director, a vice president and a smattering of senators. Congressional staff members have found their way to private equity, too: Lobbying disclosure forms for the largest firms are filled with the names of former chiefs of staff, counsels and legislative directors. Carlyle, for instance, at various times employed two former F.C.C. chairmen, a former S.E.C. chair, a former NATO supreme allied commander, a former secretary of state and a former British prime minister, among others.
Such investments have paid off, as firms have lobbied to protect favored tax treatments, which in turn have given them disproportionate benefits when their investments succeed. The most prominent of these benefits is the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity executives to pay such low tax rates. The issue has been on the national agenda since at least 2006, and three presidents have tried to close the loophole. All three have failed.

Banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.NaE) and PNC Financial Services Group Inc (PNC.NaE), are vying to buy First Republic Bank (FRC.NaE) in a deal following a government seizure of the lender, Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Certainly didn’t help FRC’s stock price much late in the day. Closed down 43% to $3.51 in Friday’s regular trading. Than fell 34% more during after market trading to end the week at $2.32. It’s interesting to note the huge impact CNBC and other reporting had on the stock Friday. If someone wanted to play naughty and manipulate the price for personal gain with unsubstantiated reports, there was plenty of opportunitiy.
FRC 3.51
USD▼ -2.68 (-43.30%) today
2.32▼ 1.19 (33.90%)After Hours · April 28, 7:59 PM EDT · Market Closed
(Above excerpted from Google)

Ottawa County is in the southwestern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula along the Lake Michigan shoreline. It is home to the city of Holland whose name reflects the high population of descendants of Dutch immigrants. I’d imagine the Dutch Reformed (Protestant) Church, a conservative lot, to be prominent there. Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary under Trump is from Holland. I’m not aware of the economic base. But, due to the location along Lake Michigan tourism would be very important to the economy (read: restaurants, lodging, charter fishing). It’s likely, too, that many commute to the city of Grand Rapids for work. Areas along the lake tend to be prime areas for fruit growing due to its moderating effect on temperatures. To the east of Ottawa County lies Kent County, whose largest city is Grand Rapids. Gerald Ford, former Congressman and President, was a native of Grand Rapids.
Nothing did more to stir fractiousness of politics in rural parts of Michigan than the Covid-19 lockdowns and mask mandates. Small business owners, many with deep pockets and outsize political influence, were in revolt - defying the Governor’s Covid restrictions, flaunting the law, and taking their cases (when charged) to court where many were ultimately successful. Threats against and attempts to remove health department officials were common. I don’t know if Covid caused this ultra conservative uprising, but it certainly hastened it. And, the inspiration taken from the then occupant of the White House cannot be overlooked. (There was actually a plot to kidnap our Governor intercepted by the FBI.)
Note: It’s highly unlikely the people profiled at the public meeting are representative of the local citizenry at large. They rose to the “top” thru grit, bluster and with the help of those with business interests (and lots of money). As a friend likes to remind me: “It’s not always the cream that floats to the top.”
@Old_Joe / Yes, I’ve known folks like that. Moments to cherish.

I couldn’t get into the WP piece linked. Here’s the same basic story, easier to access.
Haven’t read this completely. Like any large state, we have good and bad here. In some rural areas there’s a hard right wing faction that exerts outsize influence due to its vociferousness and willingness to threaten those who oppose them along with an affinity for firearms. Attending public meetings can be downright scary. Disrupting meetings is a tactic used. Subtle threats fly, but usually stop short of being explicit enough to lead to arrest.
Fortunately, in many of the state’s urban, better educated areas, particularly near universities, the situation is much better. And, the Dems pretty much swept the recent state election (Governor, lawmakers) due to the type of right wing extreemists the R’s put on the ballot during primary season. Haven’t read the full article yet. Hope what I lent here is relevant. @BenWP, to best of my knowledge, resides in one of the most literate and enlightened areas of the state,

Stable-Value (SV) Rates, 5/1/23
TIAA Traditional Annuity (Accumulation) Rates
+25 bps for RC, RA, RCP, SRA; huge +175 bps for Newer IRAs.
Restricted RC 6.50%, RA 6.25%
Flexible RCP 5.75%, SRA 5.50%, Newer IRAs 5.20% (!)
TSP G Fund hasn't updated yet (previous monthly rate was 3.625%).
Options outside of workplace retirement plans include m-mkt funds, bank m-mkt accounts (FDIC insured), T-Bills, short-term brokered CDs.
#401k #403b #StableValue #TIAA #TSP
https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/post/1024/thread

Few viable paths are available for First Republic Bank. Unlikely they will get bailed out by government and they are likely to taken over by the government. This means stock will to zero. So far there is no buyers. The other option is to sell asset. The FED has broke something …
CNBC just reported:

Reuters reported Friday that U.S. officials — including from the FDIC, Treasury Department and Federal Reserve — are coordinating meetings with other banks to broker a rescue plan for First Republic.
Shares of First Republic closed at $16 on Monday before the bank reported its first-quarter results, which showed a decline in deposits of about 40%. The stock fell more than 60% over the next two days, hitting a new all-time low.

https://cnbc.com/2023/04/28/first-republics-stock-poised-to-rise-for-second-day-as-regional-bank-searches-for-rescue-deal.html

+1 old joe I regularly vote to prevent things from getting worse, and if things get better I'm pleasantly surprised !

New I-Bond Rate 4.30%, 5/1/23
Fixed/base rate 0.90%
Semiannual inflation 1.69%
Composite rate = [0.0090 + (2 x 0.0169) + (0.0090 x 0.0169)] = 0.042951 or 4.30%
www.treasurydirect.gov/savings-bonds/i-bonds/i-bonds-interest-rates/

Often, though not always, one can do a little better on the secondary market. Currently, the 3 month T-bill expected auction rate shows as 5.012%, while I'm seeing (at Fidelity) a T-bill maturing 7/27/23 with an ask yield of 5.124% (quantity 1).
You have to go digging through the book (multiple offerings of a given security) to find offerings that don't require you to buy $100K or so. If you make do the effort, you may be able to eek out another 10 basis points or so (annualized). Might not be worth your time just to make an extra 25¢ on a $1,000 T-bill over three months. Depends on how much you're investing and how long until maturity.

@yogibearbull ; Thanks for the info, "
Anyway, the 3m T-Bill still looks attractive for Monday 5/1/23 Auction. Orders can be entered at brokerages until early-AM Monday, 5/1/23. The settlement is on Thursday, 5/4/23; money would be reserved/blocked by the brokerage on Monday, but could also be covered by another security settling on 5/4/23. Fido would generate margin alert(s) but those can be ignored if there are matching settlements on 5/4/23; Schwab and Vanguard would just indicate pending activity on their balance screens but won't/shouldn't send any margin alerts."

The fed fund (overnight) rate is 4.75-5.00% (likely to change on 5/3/23). So, these rates should be viewed in that context.
The 1m T-Bill yield fell to 3.36% on 4/21/23, but yesterday (EOD, 4/27/23) it was 4.27%, low compared to the fed funds but not alarmingly so. Yesterday, the 3m T-Bill yield was 5.18%, so the 1m-3m T-Bill spread was 91 bps (vs 178 bps on 4/21/23).
Unclear how anything has changed for debt-ceiling - there is a House proposal that would be just DOA in the Senate.
Anyway, the 3m T-Bill still looks attractive for Monday 5/1/23 Auction. Orders can be entered at brokerages until early-AM Monday, 5/1/23. The settlement is on Thursday, 5/4/23; money would be reserved/blocked by the brokerage on Monday, but could also be covered by another security settling on 5/4/23. Fido would generate margin alert(s) but those can be ignored if there are matching settlements on 5/4/23; Schwab and Vanguard would just indicate pending activity on their balance screens but won't/shouldn't send any margin alerts.
https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_yield_curve&field_tdr_date_value_month=202304

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/04/28/2657083/0/en/Norsk-Hydro-Robust-results-executing-on-strategy.html
Lots of buying and selling of assets!!!!
This just sounds like musical chairs to me. WTF?
"Glencore will acquire an additional 40 percent stake in MRN which is currently owned by Vale. This 40 percent interest will be acquired by Hydro from Vale and immediately sold to Glencore on a back-to-back basis. After the transactions Hydro will no longer have an ownership position in MRN. The transactions will have a total enterprise value of USD 1.15 billion which shall be adjusted for debt like items and working capital. Closing is expected in the second half of 2023."

I gave them a call as @Old_Joe suggested. I talked with tech support & before remedy was found the call was lost somewhere along the "line". Redialed Schwab & was told I'd get a call back from Techie that was working on my problem in 15-20 minutes.
While waiting I tried a different browser . In like Flynn. Then I returned to main browser that also let me log in.
I don't know what the fix was !
Happy again, Derf

Fund Allocations (Cumulative), 03/31/23
There were minor decreases in stock & bond allocations, but notable increase in m-mkt allocation. The changes for OEFs + ETFs were based on a total AUM of about $29.47 trillion in the previous month, so +/- 1% change was about +/- $294.7 billion. Also note that these changes were from both fund inflows/outflows & price changes.
OEFs & ETFs: Stocks 57.88%, Hybrids 5.10%, Bonds 19.73%, M-Mkt 17.30%
https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/post/1022/thread

Keep in mind it was a very small wager / $1016 that “paid out” $1250. But, every dime helps. And thanks for noting.
The press reports aren’t real positive re FRC. The Federal Reserve is threatening to cut them off from the reserve lending pool that was created to help struggling banks. This threat they feel will compel FRC to negotiate a deal with some larger banks or private equity. But some of the larger banks have already helped bail them out with a cash infusion earlier in the year and are balking at any additional support. The FDIC likes to move in on a weekend if / when they close a bank. If that should happen, depositors would be made whole but shareholders would be wiped out (as Yogi pointed out yesterday).
FRC closed at $6.18 today (7-cents below where I sold).