1677: John Larsen – Your Friend, the Church

You lost me in the first 10 minutes: during the process of saying “all political opinions are welcome” and then proceeding to project moral superiority and condescension to anyone who doesn’t totally embrace the verbal vomiting of the Uber Left. I loathe the Mormon Church and organized religion In general – but I love my country, freedom and liberty in spite of that. While I have loved Mormon Stories for years – and am a frequent donator – I think I’m done with John Larsen: he’s just an angry old dude – who enjoys hearing himself bloviate. I think I’ll turn off my donations for a bit – until you folks regain your focus.

Great episode as always John’s & Co. I heard J. Larsen today reference something called privileged stock where he said. Most people don’t know this, there are two types of stock, privilege stock and the regular stock and if you buy stock in the market you don’t get the privilege stock and the the laws are set up to give preference to those special holders where they are first to be paid out in bankruptcy.

I’ve worked in Finance going on 30 yrs and I don’t ever recall hearing that term, and the concept is patently false. Anyone that has taken Finance 101 know this, so it appears that it’s only John who doesn’t.

By definition, stockholders always bear the most risk and will never be paid out before bond holders. Moreover, with the exception of restricted stock given to insiders for compensation, (which is the riskiest because they have time restrictions on when they can sell their shares) or barring some limited restriction, all stock is available to everyone once shares begin trading in the secondary markets.

Also this industry is heavily regulated and companies by law have to disclose their financials to the public every quarter so if there is something like this, everyone would know about it. There are no laws that give this equity privilege, in fact it’s the exact opposite where the laws put the public before insiders.

Maybe John was thinking of preferred stock which carry’s rights to be paid dividends before common holders, but in the event of liquidation, bond holders get first dibs on any remaining assets and the assets will be gone before they ever reach stockholders. There can be classes of stock that restrict voting rights but again, they never put stock holders before bond holders.

I need to correct this because it portrays and evil Gotham City style corruption where only the privileged get these secret benefits. It’s simply not true.