MSCI prices secondary stock offering of 23M shares

The shares are being sold by Morgan Stanley, which is currently a majority shareholder of MSCI. The sale was first announced two weeks ago.

The sale price is a discount of less than 1 percent of MSCI's Tuesday closing price of $32.16.

Morgan Stanley owns about 53 million shares of MSCI. MSCI has about 101.3 million shares outstanding.

MSCI will not receive any of the proceeds from the stock sale.

Morgan Stanley granted underwriters an option to purchase an additional 3.45 million shares to cover over-allotments.

The sale of shares by Morgan Stanley will raise $736 million at a time when it is dealing, like most investment banks, with continued problems in the credit markets.

Investment banks have been struggling since the middle of 2007 as the result of steep declines in the value of investment holdings such as mortgage-backed securities. As mortgages increasingly defaulted, bonds backed by the troubled loans lost value. That forced banks to reduce the value of their holdings by billions of dollars.

Problems spread to other types of debt investors deemed risky, and a recovery has yet to materialize.

During its fiscal second quarter, which ended May 31, Morgan Stanley said its profit tumbled 61 percent to $1.01 billion, or 95 cents per share. Second-quarter results were significantly boosted by the sale of $1.4 billion of assets.