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December 27, 2008
Morningstar calls Forest City stock worthless, but FCE vehemently objects
Writes Like She Talks
This is further to an earlier report on Forest City's stock being awarded an estimated value of $0 by Morningstar. This blog entry asks the questions: Why did it take Forest City over two weeks to respond to the Morningstar evaluation and why did the Cleveland Plain Dealer fail to cover to story until Forest City responded?
This news may not be news to people who follow Forest City Enterprises more closely than I do, but I hadn’t seen anything about any of this until this morning in this post at Atlantic Yards Report, a blog that does follow FCE very closely.
First, Morningstar, on 12/9/08, in an article subtitled, “We’d prefer a pack of gum to these businesses”:
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The Washington Post writes about it on 12/21/08 in an article called, “Not Worth the Paper They’re Printed On”:
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The Atlantic Yards Report feels that FCE’s concerns are reasonable, and I have no idea how these things work My only question is, why did it take more than two weeks for Forest City to issue this rebuttal? And, again, it looks like this battle over the rating has been kept very very down-low. Given the economic times, that’s not surprising, but is it proper news provision on the Plain Dealer’s part?
The day before the Morningstar analysis was published, on 12/8/08, the PD published this item about FCE withholding dividends, but the Plain Dealer didn’t publish anything about Morningstar’s 12/9/08 review of FCE until two days ago, on 12/24/08, more than two weeks after Morningstar published its review. Do not even try to convince me that the PD didn’t know about the Morningstar pan before then. Then, the FCE objection was published…yesterday, two and a half weeks after the hit.
So - only if it comes home, we hear about it? Otherwise, it’s too business wonky?
Posted by steve at December 27, 2008 8:04 AM