Super Money

A few decades ago, a book called “Super Money” (by George Goodman, aka “Adam Smith”) described how American entrepreneurship was creating super money every time their start-up companies issued initial public offerings (IPOs) and then the prices of these new stocks went up ... manufacturing enormous wealth out of thin air. New products and services are imagined, created and marketed to people to propel these new companies to success. This is the power of our free-market economic system in a nutshell.

Dear reader, this is a magical way that the “invisible hand” of capitalism creates wealth ... lots and lots of wealth. Jeff Bazos has, by himself created almost a trillion dollars of super money. And he and his ex-wife have been rewarded with about 10% of this super wealth. This is not accidental. It has happened over and over to American go-getters to create our “golden city on the hill.” And yes this wealth that capitalism creates does get re-distributed to others as it is spent ... and these new companies hire people ... and their taxes pay for our government and to build infrastructure. (Hear that Elizabeth Warren and BHO?)

But there is always a problem wrapped up in capitalism. That is that the dispersion of this super money doesn’t happen fast enough and to the taste of many proto-Socialists. Jealousy, dear reader jealousy, rears it’s ugly head ... fanned by the likes of Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers. (Funny though how Bernie seems to be enjoying his entry into the cult of millionaires.) But this super money does get spread around ... which is why America is so wealthy and can afford our social programs ... and so is where many of the worls’s needy want to live ... and some even want to be given the opportunity to prosper like Bezos, the son of Cuban immigrants.

But when these social programs become more important than capitalism and its super money ... that is when the golden goose is strangled. Funny how so few people ... even many recipients of super money ... understand this simple truth.

Free Ride

The initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba Group Ltd. (BABA), the huge Chinese Internet company, has made quite a few investors quite a bit of money ... and I don't even mean the venture capitalists and other initial and mezzanine investors like Yahoo. I mean those people and companies who were allocated stock in the initial distribution this morning at $68 per share. They then had opportunities to sell this stock for as much as $99.70 per share after the stock started trading about noon today at $92.70. During my days on Wall Street, selling an IPO during its first trading day used to be called a "free ride."

The size of this initial offering was 320.1 million shares and the total volume for this first trading day totaled over 271 million shares. This means that it is possible that many of those who received their shares on the original allocation had a opportunity to sell them for at least a $24.70 per share profit to as much as $31.70 per share profit ... meaning that those who were lucky enough to get these allocations were wealthier (on paper anyway) by at least $7.91 billion ... possibly more. Not bad! Basically all this wealth was just created out of thin air. One clever author call this IPO-created magical wealth, Supermoney ... see: Amazon Listing.

To me, this suggests that all this monetary gas may keep the stock market inflated for a while yet. To read more about this IPO and Alibaba itself read: Marketwatch Writeup.

Afterthought: Thinking about this IPO further, I may have stumbled upon the fundamental advantage of capitalism ... super wealth creation. Such things just don't happen under those economies of the commonwealth variety. Perhaps that is why the U.S. keeps winning despite all our screw-ups?