Morgan Stanley Bet the Farm in Ukraine Before Taxpayers’ Bailout...(looses ass)

[dustup]

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Morgan Stanley Bet the Farm in Ukraine Before Taxpayers’ Bailout

Iowa native Justin Bruch marveled at the opportunity when Morgan Stanley (MS) called in late 2007 to recruit him for an unusual assignment.

The New York bank, flush with $7.5 billion in fiscal 2006 profit -- the biggest in its history -- was going to be farming 11 parcels on the steppes of Ukraine. The commodities team wanted Bruch, a redhead with meaty hands who’d been farming all his life, to manage one of them.

Bruch saw a chance to dig into some famous dirt, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. The former Soviet republic has 30 percent of the world’s black soil, earth so fertile Adolf Hitler had Nazi troops cart some back to Germany during World War II. Wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflowers thrive there.

“It’s like the prairie land that was broken in the Midwest 100 years ago,” says Bruch, 34, who grew up on his family’s 2,500-acre (1,012-hectare) corn and soybean farm. “The soil and potential for crops that Ukraine has is the best in the world.”

Morgan Stanley was primed for the investment. It was then the second-largest U.S. securities firm by market value, after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) Chief Executive Officer John Mack was pushing managers to take more risks.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-04/morgan-stanley-bet-the-farm-in-ukraine-before-fed-bailout-by-u-s-taxpayer.html

They risked their cash in a foreign market, lost and asked for a bailout from the American people!  Maybe if they would have kept their cash in an investment of the US JOBS crisis they wouldn't have lost their asses

[SufferedMoreThanJesus]

Heh heh.  $7.5 Billion worth of dirt.

What happened to that dirt?