Steven Davidoff Solomon quoted by The New York Times, March 1, 2017
The bankers played another tried-and-true trick: limit the supply. Only about 19 percent of Snap’s total share float was offered, and a quarter of that amount was sold subject to a one-year lockup. Snap’s remaining capital needs were filled by a $1.2 billion loan from the same bankers underwriting the offering.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2017
This is the new shareholder activism. The low-hanging fruit, and tricks like selling the company or spinning off a business, are drying up. Instead, a few shareholder activists are now trying something much harder — actually digging into the operations of a company and working to turn it around.
Steven Davidoff Solomon quoted by Bloomberg BNA, Feb. 23, 2017
Proving a material adverse event often requires battling in court over questions like whether an incident was “significant” and “durational,” said Davidoff, who has written in the past that about the Yahoo/Verizon deal. He noted that it’s not at all clear whether data breaches — even of the size disclosed by Yahoo — would rise to that level.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 21, 2017
Kraft Heinz’s $143 billion bid for Unilever would have been the biggest cross-border deal in nearly two decades. But instead of being a triumph of global capitalism, it induced only whiplash as the offer was withdrawn just days after its disclosure. The short life span of the deal can be blamed in large part on national barriers — which are likely to rise even further as a new mercantilism emerges.
Robert Bartlett and Steven Davidoff Solomon cited by Bloomberg BNA, Feb. 15, 2017
What can the SEC do on its own without congressional action? That is an “enormously complicated question,” said Robert Bartlett. … At a minimum, the SEC should “consider the effects on small business capital formation when it encourages funds to be more systematic in their liquidity risk management.”
Bartlett … and University of California, Berkeley, law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon co-authored a September 2016 paper that found that since 1998—when the Asian financial crisis and other events spurred a flight to liquidity—the largest mutual funds have invested in fewer smaller IPOs.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 14, 2017
The Op-Ed article was so over the top in its attacks on Mr. Schwarzman and private equity that it obscured some very valid points.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2017
If the government really wants to preserve the 30-year mortgage market, it should simply limit these two entities to that loan product, and only that 30-year loan product. Everything else seems not only to preserve the tenuous position of Fannie and Freddie, but also to risk making them just instruments for unrestrained housing policy with lots of unintended consequences and risks.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2017
Snap has followed the natural evolution of this disenfranchisement, simply eliminating shareholder rights from the get-go. And this is not just about replicating the venture capital model, where founders get control but investors get board seats and veto rights over significant transactions. Here, Snap is not even giving crumbs.
Steven Davidoff Solomon quoted by The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2017
So how will Washington look at this acquisition? In a basic sense, the threat to national security is tangential — this is a payment service with many competitors. Yet MoneyGram is part of the backbone of domestic and international wire transfer.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Jan. 24, 2017
Snap is apparently going to make sure that the public has no vote and hence never the opportunity to have a say in the company’s governance. While public shareholders will be totally disenfranchised, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy are reportedly going to have 70 percent of the total vote despite owning only 40 percent of Snap.