Morning Agenda: A Smooth Start for Twitter

TWITTER’S SMOOTH DEBUT  |  Twitter on its first day of trading managed to avoid the missteps that marred Facebook’s debut last year, though the lofty market valuation it achieved adds pressure on the company to turn a profit soon, DealBook’s David Gelles reports.

Twitter’s shares closed at $44.90, 73 percent above the I.P.O. price. Still, that was slightly lower than the opening figure of $45.10 a share. The stock began trading around 10:30 a.m. under the ticker TWTR, rising as high as $50.09 a share before settling around $46 by midafternoon. Despite a smooth start, the company is sure to face continued scrutiny as it works to justify a valuation of $31.7 billion to stock market investors, Mr. Gelles says.

“This is a giant poker game,” said Lawrence E. Leibowitz, chief operating officer of NYSE Euronext, as traders and bankers set the opening price in the minutes before Twitter’s stock began trading. “It will be a bit volatile, but it’s a very exciting deal.”

One of the big winners in the deal is Suhail R. Rizvi, 47, an investor who tends to stay out of the spotlight. He runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter, with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday, Alexandra Stevenson and Nicole Perlroth report in The New York Times. “Mr. Rizvi’s rise illustrates how a new tech investor class with deep Wall Street connections is carving new paths into the unfamiliar and insular terrain of Silicon Valley.”

Thursday included a number of notable moments, which were chronicled by DealBook in a live blog. Protesters gathered at Twitter headquarters, for example, and the parents of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chairman, provided emotional support for the company’s debut.

UBS BUYS BACK TOXIC ASSETS  |  The Swiss bank UBS said on Friday that it had paid $3.76 billion to Switzerland’s central bank to repurchase the remaining value of a portfolio of troubled assets taken off its books during the financial crisis, in the latest sign of strengthening among European banks, DealBook’s Chad Bray reports. As part of a rescue plan five years ago, UBS spun off $38.7 billion in illiquid or distressed assets into a fund backed by the Swiss government and the Swiss National Bank. The fund, known as the StabFund, repaid a $1 billion loan to the Swiss central bank this year, a condition for UBS to be able to repurchase the remaining assets, Mr. Bray writes.

BLACKBERRY’S LATEST INVESTORS  |  Canadian, American and Qatari investors are helping to finance Fairfax Financial Holding’s planned $1 billion investment in the struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry, Ian Austen reports in DealBook.The largest contribution, $300 million, comes from Canso Investment Counsel, a privately held money manager based north of Toronto, according to a securities filing made on Thursday. Other investors include Mackenzie Financial, owned by the Power Corporation of Montreal; Brookfield Asset Management of Toronto; the Markel Corporation, based in Glen Allen, Va.; and Qatar Holding, an investment house started by the Qatar Investment Authority, Mr. Austen reports.

ON THE AGENDA  |  The jobs report for October is released at 8:30 a.m. The Reuters/University of Michigan reading of consumer sentiment for November is released at 9:55 a.m.

A PLUMBER AIMS TO FIX EUROPE’S BANKS  |  Charlie Mullins, the founder and owner of Pimlico Plumbers in London, who made his fortune fixing other people’s plumbing, is now seeking to fix the European banking sector, Julia Werdigier writes in DealBook. His idea is to reduce bankers’ pay and thereby force banks to become more cost-effective and customer-friendly. As for threats that bankers would leave London or Frankfurt and move to the United States or Asia should their compensation be curbed? Those are bluffs that need to be called, he said.

“There are a lot of bankers out there already, and ours aren’t any better or cleverer,” Mr. Mullins said. “It’s plumbers’ common sense.”

DEALBOOK’S COMING CONFERENCE  |  On Nov. 12, The New York Times will host its second annual DealBook conference in Manhattan. Speakers include Preet Bharara, David Bonderman, Ray Dalio, Barry Diller, Laurence D. Fink, Valerie Jarrett, Daniel S. Loeb, Elon Musk, Ruth Porat and David M. Rubenstein, among others. Don’t hesitate to submit questions online.

Mergers & Acquisitions »

IBM Finance Chief to Retire  |  Mark Loughridge, the chief financial officer of IBM, plans to retire at the end of the year after almost a decade on the job, the company said. He will be succeeded by Martin Schroeter, who previously was the company’s head of global finance.
REUTERS

Johnson & Johnson Unit Is Said to Attract Bidders  |  The health care company Danaher is teaming up with the Blackstone Group “to bid for Johnson & Johnson’s diagnostics unit, which makes blood screening equipment and laboratory blood tests and could fetch more than $4 billion, according to people familiar with the matter,” Reuters reports.
REUTERS

Salix to Buy Drug Maker Santarus  |  Salix Pharmaceuticals said Thursday that it would acquire Santarus, a maker of gastrointestinal and other specialty drugs, for $2.6 billion in cash, or $32 a share. The purchase price is about 36 percent higher than Santarus’s closing price on Wednesday.
DealBook »

INVESTMENT BANKING »

White House Names Senior Bank of America Executive to Commerce Post  |  If confirmed by the Senate, Stefan M. Selig would be joining an administration that has had a challenging relationship with Wall Street.
DealBook »

Metal Exchange Changes Rules to Reduce Wait Times  |  The New York Times reports: “Hoping to reduce the warehouse delays that have added billions of dollars to the prices that consumers pay for beverage cans and other aluminum products, the London Metals Exchange has released new regulations meant to reduce the waiting times at storage facilities owned by commodities traders and banks like Goldman Sachs.”
NEW YORK TIMES

Card Act Cleared Up Hidden Costs  |  A study on a 2009 law intended to force down the hidden fees that credit card companies collect from their customers came to a surprising conclusion, Floyd Norris writes in the High & Low Finance column in The New York Times. “The regulation worked.”
NEW YORK TIMES

Goldman Discloses Foreign Exchange Inquiry  |  Goldman Sachs on Thursday became the latest big bank to acknowledge that it was the subject of a series of wide-ranging investigations into the potential manipulation of the $5-trillion-a-day foreign exchange market
DealBook »

Royal Bank of Scotland to Pay $153.7 Million to Settle Mortgage Case  |  The Securities and Exchange Commission concluded that a bank subsidiary failed to investigate the quality of the underlying loans in a mortgage-backed security offering in 2007.
DealBook »

PRIVATE EQUITY »

Warburg Pincus Names General Counsel  |  The private equity firm Warburg Pincus has appointed Robert B. Knauss, a corporate partner at the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, as general counsel and managing director.
DealBook »

HEDGE FUNDS »

Hedge Fund Is Said to Push for Men’s Wearhouse Merger  |  Eminence Capital has acquired about a 9.8 percent stake in Men’s Wearhouse and is said to be planning to push for strategic options like a proposed merger with Jos. A. Bank.
DealBook »

I.P.O./OFFERINGS »

Another Fire Raises Fresh Questions for Tesla  |  A Tesla Model S was destroyed by a fire after its battery was damaged â€" the third one in six weeks.
NEW YORK TIMES

VENTURE CAPITAL »

Path Is Said to Lose Its Head of Business  |  “We’ve heard that Path’s head of business Matt Van Horn gave notice yesterday, in order to co-found his own company with Path iOS developer Nikhil Bhogal,” Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch reports.
TECHCRUNCH

LEGAL/REGULATORY »

New York Fed Chief Says Big Banks Lack Respect for Law  |  “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions,” William Dudley, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a speech on Thursday. “Whether this is due to size and complexity, bad incentives, or some other issues is difficult to judge, but it is another critical problem that needs to be addressed.”
HUFFINGTON POST

A Balancing Act for India’s Central Banker  |  The New York Times writes: “Raghuram Rajan, the head of India’s central bank, began his career as an economic theoretician. But a willingness to delve into the mechanics of an economic system may prove to be a bigger asset as he tries to straighten out India’s economy.”
NEW YORK TIMES

In Surprise Move, European Central Bank Cuts Rate  |  “The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low on Thursday, moving to head off what some economists fear could be a long period of stagnation like the one that has afflicted Japan,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

Economic Growth Gain Blurs Signs of Weakness  |  “Five years after the global economy was falling at its fastest rate, Western economies are still failing to gain much-needed momentum, despite the efforts of central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

White House Estimates Price of Government Shutdown  |  “Lost work: 6.6 million days. Back-pay costs: $2 billion. Private-sector jobs lost: 120,000. Those are just some of the costs of the 16-day partial government shutdown that ended last month, the Obama administration said in a detailed report released Thursday,” The New York Times reports.
NEW YORK TIMES