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From an unnamed media company whose stock is 75% off its high:

Some experts have said that the law was wrong-headed in its effort to retain the hybrid nature of the mortgage finance giants, which are private companies with publicly traded stock, but which have an explicit guarantee of help from the government — an arrangement that critics say privatizes the profits but socializes the risk and any losses.

Let me take a deep breath to get my head around this, but the definition of the public company is one with publicly traded stock, therefore a private company can't have publicly traded stock. Now if they meant private in the sense that it's not nationalized, well that's a different can of incoherence. If it were nationalized, then it wouldn't be publicly traded. Is this really that hard?

Posted by edelfenbein at July 30, 2008 2:20 PM