Warrington in the News Articles: page 35

On the anniversary of Facebook’s public markets debut, Cordell Eminent Scholar Jay Ritter shares insights for this story looking back at the company’s long and controversial journey.

Investment banks have raked in billions of dollars by feeding the frenzy for blank-check companies, and they have done so largely without risking any of their own money on hundreds of deals that have left many investors with punishing losses.

Cordell Eminent Scholar and IPO expert Jay Ritter shares his insights for this story.

Will Twitter become a better place for regular people to have more open and honest discussions online once Elon Musk takes over? While some worry about what changes the billionaire will make to the site if he follows through with his plan to buy it, Public Utility Research Center Director and Gunter Professor Mark Jamison has a piece in The Hill outlining the benefits of Musk’s purchase for regular people and the downsides for Meta.

Seemingly every week there’s another blockbuster transaction in the metaverse, like the Yuga Labs “land” grab from a few weeks ago that saw users spend the equivalent of more than $300 million on virtual real estate, nearly crashing the Ethereum network.

The next step might be a metaverse economy that crosses over into the real world of atoms, not bits, as they say. What if you could do your shopping not from an Amazon list, but in a sort of virtual supermarket, or shopping mall, without leaving your home?

“These marketplaces are new, small, and still evolving,” said Public Utility Research Center Director and Gunter Professor Mark Jamison, an economist and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has studied the metaverse. “You’re involved in trying to project into the future whether it’s going to be a viable product, and a viable place to engage in your transactions.”

Cordell Eminent Scholar Jay Ritter shares his insights on the CFA Institute’s recommendation that SPAC sponsors fully disclose any affiliations with investors and target companies.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it’s taking a break from handling special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), or blank check, initial public offerings amid a sharp slowdown in the market in recent months.

IPO expert Jay Ritter, Cordell Eminent Scholar at University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, said Goldman may be blaming regulators for its current exit from the SPAC market, but the big banks have already pulled out anyway.

Cordell Eminent Scholar Jay Ritter shared his insights on the top skills for technology jobs in investment banks.

Read Ritter’s insights on what investment banks look for in the technology professionals they hire.

With Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, many are worried about what that could mean for speech on the platform. Public Utility Research Center Director and Gunter Professor Mark Jamison says they shouldn’t be worried, unless they are Mark Zuckerberg.

“Who should be afraid of a Musk-led Twitter, however, is Meta — a company that Musk says gives him ‘the willies.’ A Musk-led Twitter ultimately could attract more users and move into the metaverse more seamlessly than Meta — putting the Mark Zuckerberg-led social media giant under greater competitive pressure than ever before.”

What a difference a day makes. On Thursday, Ostin Technology GroupOST –21.26%, a Chinese supplier of display modules, gave back most of the 892% gain from its first day as a publicly traded company.

The IPO market has seen quite a few low-float listings this year among the few firms that have gone public, said Cordell Eminent Scholar Jay Ritter, who studies special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACS, and IPOs. Almost all are money-losing companies with little or no revenue, Ritter said.

Last year, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, signaling its shift from traditional social media to a big bet on the so-called metaverse. This network of 3D, online spaces is accessed through virtual reality headsets like Meta’s Oculus and promises to revolutionize internet communications. But is there substance behind the hype, or is the metaverse just a fad? And if virtual reality worlds are here to stay, what do policymakers need to know about them? To answer those questions, Political Economy with James Pethokoukis brought Mark Jamison on the podcast.

Jamison is the director of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Over the past several months, Jamison has been writing about the metaverse and the challenges it faces.