Morning Agenda: Corzine Fights Back

CORZINE SEEKS CASE’S DISMISSAL  |  Lawyers for Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey governor accused of a failure of leadership at the helm of the brokerage firm MF Global, filed a motion late Tuesday to dismiss a civil case against him brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulated MF Global until its demise in 2011, DealBook’s Ben Protess reports. The 30-page motion outlined Mr. Corzine’s defense and leveled a sharp critique of the commission.

“There is no evidence demonstrating that Mr. Corzine knowingly directed unlawful conduct or acted without good faith,” wrote the lawyers from Dechert, Andrew J. Levander and Benjamin E. Rosenberg. “Rather than acknowledge that reality and move on, the C.F.T.C. has clung to its baseless presumptions and manufactured charges of wrongdoing that are supposedly connected to Mr. Corzine.”

VERIZON’S BIG BOND SALE  |  Verizon Communications plans to sell up to $49 billion of bonds in record debt offering that could come as soon as Thursday, Bloomberg News reports, citing unidentified people with knowledge of the transaction. The offering, to finance Verizon’s $130 billion deal to take full control of its wireless business, is said to include fixed-rate debt with maturities ranging from three to 30 years, as well as floating-rate securities, according to the report.

The huge debt offering would eclipse a $17 billion bond deal by Apple earlier this year. As DealBook’s Michael J. de la Merced wrote recently, Verizon’s deal highlights what bankers describe as the continued health of the debt markets. “The demand for the debt has surprised even the banks selling the bonds, said people familiar with the plans,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

ON THE AGENDA  |  Today is the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Data on wholesale inventories in July is released at 10 a.m. The veteran hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller is on Bloomberg TV at 11 a.m. Carl C. Icahn is on CNBC at 4:10 p.m.

A TRADING FRENZY OVER LINKEDIN SHARES  | 
LinkedIn’s recent sale of stock worth $1.2 billion at $223 a share was no doubt good for the company and its advisers, Steven M. Davidoff writes in the Deal Professor column. But do such deals benefit shareholders? Or do they simply feed a trading frenzy?

Despite the company’s tremendous growth potential, the stock price “is in nosebleed territory,” Mr. Davidoff writes. “LinkedIn trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 722. For comparison, Facebook stock trades at a ratio of 165 times price to earnings and Google 27 times price to earnings.” What is more, “research on secondary stock offerings, offerings of stock once the company has already traded, has shown that in general, they tend to underperform the market.”

Mergers & Acquisitions »

Icahn’s Last Chance on Dell  |  Carl C. Icahn says he will seek appraisal rights in the Delaware courts, a legal maneuver that lets a judge decide how much Dell shares are worth. A new analysis from the law firm Fish & Richardson finds that in most cases courts find for a higher price.
DealBook »

AT&T Buys Spectrum From Verizon Wireless For $1.9 Billion  | 
REUTERS

Tesco Sells U.S. Grocery Chain to Burkle  |  Tesco, the British supermarket chain, completed its retreat from the United States on Tuesday after selling most of its Fresh & Easy convenience stores to an affiliate of the money-management firm run by the billionaire Ronald W. Burkle.
DealBook »

Cisco to Buy Flash-Storage Company  |  The $415 million deal for Whiptail may increase tensions between Cisco and EMC, the large storage company that has been a longtime partner.
DealBook »

INVESTMENT BANKING »

Dow Index Drops Bank of America, Alcoa and H.P.  |  Three stalwarts of corporate America that have fallen out of favor lately with investors will be replaced in the Dow Jones industrial average by Goldman Sachs, Visa and Nike.
DealBook » | Economix Blog: The Not-So-Industrial Average

Sanford Weill Pledges $100 Million More for Cornell Medical School  |  Sanford I. Weill, the former Citigroup chief, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife, Joan, are giving an additional $100 million to Weill Cornell Medical College, bringing the total amount they have given to the school to more than $600 million.
CNBC

Class Divisions Seen at Harvard Business School  |  Even within the elite confines of Harvard Business School, class is seen as a divisive issue, with one student from the class of 2013 calling it “a pervasive problem,” Jodi Kantor of The New York Times reports.
NEW YORK TIMES

A Recovery for the Rich  |  “The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty,” Annie Lowrey writes on the Economix blog.
NEW YORK TIMES ECONOMIX

Housing Slump Weighs on India  |  “The real estate market in cities across India is crumbling as the Indian economy slows,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

PRIVATE EQUITY »

For Warburg Pincus, a Spate of ‘Exits’  |  The private equity firm Warburg Pincus has recently been moving to get out of several prominent investments, Fortune’s Dan Primack notes. “Private equity firms know that exit windows can close suddenly, particularly for large portfolio companies.”
FORTUNE

HEDGE FUNDS »

Hedge Fund Chief Sounds Off on Big Banks  |  Kenneth C. Griffin, head of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, tells The Financial Times: “If I had been the Treasury secretary back in 2009, I’d have broken these megabanks up.”
FINANCIAL TIMES

Vodafone Calls Hedge Fund’s Bluff  |  The British wireless giant says it won’t tweak its $10 billion offer for Kabel Deutschland, even as Elliott Management builds a possible blocking stake. That’s sensible, Quentin Webb of Reuters Breakingviews writes.
REUTERS BREAKINGVIEWS

I.P.O./OFFERINGS »

With a New Hire, Outbrain Stokes I.P.O. Speculation  |  The content-recommendation service Outbrain hired a chief financial officer, but a possible initial public offering is likely a ways off, AllThingsD writes.
ALLTHINGSD

VENTURE CAPITAL »

Greylock Partners Raises $1 Billion for New Fund  |  The venture capital firm Greylock Partners, which raised its 14th fund, “has now fully reinvented itself as a Silicon Valley power player,” AllThingsD writes.
ALLTHINGSD

LEGAL/REGULATORY »

Embracing an Economist Who Saw the Crisis Coming  |  Wynne Godley of the Levy Economics Institute, who died in 2010, developed a model that predicted the financial crisis. “His influence has begun to spread,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

Commodities Businesses by Banks May Face New Curbs  |  “Financial-industry executives expect the Federal Reserve to issue guidelines as soon as this month limiting bank participation in so-called physical-commodities businesses,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
WALL STREET JOURNAL

A Popular Maneuver Offers Capital Relief for Banks  |  Reuters writes: “U.S. banks are increasingly giving up the right to sell tens of billions of securities in their investment portfolios, a shift that helps them avoid the pain of weaker bond markets but will cut into future profits as interest rates rise.”
REUTERS

European Plan for Transaction Tax Runs Into Legal Hurdle  |  An opinion by a legal group advising the European Commission concludes that the proposed tax “exceeds member states’ jurisdiction for taxation” and “is discriminatory and likely to lead to distortion of competition.”
DealBook »

Court Says Privacy Case Against Google Can Proceed  |  A federal appeals court in San Francisco said on Tuesday that a lawsuit accusing Google of illegal wiretapping could proceed.
NEW YORK TIMES