:)

It is Germany telling the pigs in the City that their Anglo games will not be allowed in Germany.
If it takes a little government help, oh well.

The value of anything is anything these days, and many are even manipulating the values to the extent they can get away with it.
The fact that Porsche positions itself to take advantage of companies that are about to short them is just part of the game that investment and finance has become.

Bertel, you should expand this post into an article and sell it to a glossy magazine, so that the intelligensia could learn about this too. Moreover, I would buy a book detailing the whole Porsche saga and I bet others would too.

What they mean is that most people who got hurt were rich, so it serves them right. But that is callous to the extreme.

Porsche/VW were only able to do this because they were trading on inside information. It may be legal in Germany because of loopholes — German financial regulators are famously lax. But that sure doesn’t make it ethical.

I dislike, nay hate the hedgies as much as the next guy. But this ain’t no Robin Hood story. Remember, we are talking about a rich car company here.

To me, it sounds more like arrogant German engineers getting back at arrogant Anglo-Saxon financial types. Not a pretty picture.

But it was not just inside information that made those billions for Porsche/VW; it was inside information combined with gigantic leverage. Which is exactly what has brought lots of hedgies down. It wouldn’t surprise me if Porsche/VW now thinks it knows the secret to minting billions on the market. Arrogance comes before a fall, or, to quote Morrissey, November spawned a monster.

@guyincognito:
Panamera: What Cayenne buyers buy now that SUVs aren’t cool. Global financial crisis be damned, they will fly off of lots, and keep the market hot for nifty OEM optional floor mats, thereby keeping R&D swimming in money and building superlative Caymans and Carreras.

(If a dominating stake in GMSchnitzel doesn’t sink them first. The Piechs have lost on this sort of wager before.)

+ Probably illegal; -at least in the US.

++ Aren’t the financials of many German companies -or at least automakers- very unclear b/c of weird laws they have???

[kicks self for not betting with Porsche when first heard the acquisition rumors]

+++Piech’s fluffery was probably a good feint, as part of the Plausible Deniability of his cover story. The more misdirections you have, often the better the real agenda works.

This is stock manipulation at its worst. It hurts the credibility of the markets when the pricing mechanism can’t be trusted. Prices are supposed to be derived from demand for the stock, which in turn should be derived from expected earnings and company performance, and not from this.

You can bet that there were little people who bought this stock at a relatively high price who will have gotten creamed by buying at the wrong time and paying too much.

Some of these executives need to go to prison for this. If German laws bar their prosecution, then those laws need to be changed so that the next guy who does this spends his retirement years in a cell.

When you see this sort of thing, you have to wonder if the markets are still structured in a way that provides any use to the system. A friend of mine recently spent a weekend with a bunch of really high rollers. These guys all got stupid rich by being financial players of some sort or another (oil, gas, stocks, hedge fund guys, etc.)

What he came away with is that none of these guys could tell you what stock to buy, EVER. They were all playing such macro trades that their investments would NEVER provide information on which companies were better values as the closest they got to that was to buy sector funds, or some derivative of one of those.

All I could think of was that Wall Street could now be guilty of ignoring its most fundamental purpose. If the smartest guys aren’t directing our capital, but are instead making all sorts of trades between different markets and vehicles in such a way that they are actually making the market prices LESS informative to the rest of us, then we should really look into whether they should still be allowed to play their games the same way.

I’ve been having fun following the German papers on this story – the comments run the field from disbelief to glee to worry (“Is it legal?”)

In fact, what we have been privy to, was the final set-piece confrontation in a battle that was long in the brewing, with elements brought into position surreptitiously, before the order to attack was given, as the markets went haywire a short while ago.

Is this a good thing? If it gives Porsche/VW the clout it needs to preserve the integrity of the brands in the portfolio – then yes, it is a good thing. We have seen how the world of finance has contributed to the destruction of other brands, and now we got an exemplary case of Aikido, using the strengths of the attacker against himself.

And do remember – Hedge Fund Managers have been granting themselves up to 40% cuts from the funds they have managed, while contributing to the financial crisis the world’s in with their bets on the market. And now they find themselves outmaneuvered in a manner that would have brought tears to the eyes of Guderian if he’d been able to see it.

In London, it’s rumored that Porsche has brought down the major players in the local hedge fund industry with this ploy.

I agree with Bertel; Germans have been stereotyped as a lot of things but Subtlety is not one of them

ie the Schleiffen Plan of 1914.

Kudos to Porsche!

Yes, now that Porsche has had their way with the hedgies they’ll be selling them Golfs instead. Awesome.