and rob cox, us editor of reuters "breakingviews," a financial news website. well, rob cox, when we start to look at what went wrong, look at morgan stanley and the underwriters. what is their role and what are the questions for them? >> in any i.p.o. you try to balance the demand from the stock from institutional investors like big pension funds and hedge funds and some retail investors and you try to get the right balance so you price it appropriately so that in the first day of trading it doesn't go way up in the sky and pop like it used to back in the big internet i.p.o. days of the late '90s but also doesn't decline like we've seen with facebook. and it's a really delicate balance. it's a very difficult job. but, you know, generally you try to get it right so that everybody's happy at the end of the day. you don't have four days later everybody talking about a botched i.p.o., a problematic i.p.o., you don't have mary shapiro and the s.e.c. and all sorts of regulators jumping in on it. and that just... that clearly didn't happen in this case. >> brown: ana

welcome, gentlemen, to you both, rob cox beginning with you, what did you make of today's ipo, did it fail to live up to the hype? >> you know, it was the best and the worst of american capitallism. i mean you have $100 billion company go public at which none of the people who went public with it today actually made any money. if you bought the stock, you didn't make any money, right. but a hundred billion dollars of value was created. it had all of the hype. it had all of the sort of excitement that we have in capitalism. and remember, it's an incriblereatn. 900 million people connected around the world. it's brought joy, tears, laughter, annoyance, all those things. but at the same time it was sort of the ultimate deal of the .1%, the thousand or so people without got in before it went public and had $100 billion valuation, it's extraordinary. >> warner: what would you add to that the best and the worse. do you think it is a disappointment to the investors? >> well, clearly i think people are expecting a bigger increase in the stock price after the first day. normly i this li this,

rob cox, i'm told, is wearing a stanley cup beard.idn't realize that facial hair and hockey had such an association, robert. a quick survey of the panel, does anybody on the panel think we're going to end up in a situation anything like what we saw last year, starting with you, rob? >> yes, we will. a bit worse because we are going to be going into it probably around the end of the year. we are going to have a lame duck congress. potentially a change in the white house. who the heck knows, and also other things happening at the end of the year or beginning of the year like the end of the bush tax cuts that will complicate the whole debate. >> jonathan? >> i agree with rob. after being here in this town during the last debt ceiling craziness, i have to agree with rob 100%. >> and imogen? >> well, obviously, i agree. i'm in britain at the moment. i'm finding it all quite extraordinary that the speaker came out today saying he welcomed showdowns basically. america doesn't need the theatrics. they need people to get the job done. it is qu

rob cox who wrote about this for the daily beast, sam, basically on the beat, as it were. is an idea that i've always liked. where does it stand in the market? >> i think it's ironic that it's actually going to be up to corporate democracy to save democracy. that's sort of the point here. and i'm not sure that shareholders will think the same way citizens do. i mean they're not going to go out there and necessarily vote on -- they're going to vote on their own self-interest which is what will this do for my company? but actually there is an argument, there's a very good argument for why you should actually vote for your company -- >> so i'm a shareholder of whatever it is, and you're work for the proxy company and you're pitching me. you're saying, okay, ratigan i want you to vote in favor of this. what's the pitch to shareholders? >> i'll say this. i'll give you an example. target two years ago put $150,000 into a sort of pac-like organization just after the citizens united deal. and that organization basically supported a pretty far right republican candidate who was ver