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As widely predicted, Unocal gets a China Price. $67 per share. All cash.
Posted by dan at 08:36 AM
The Germans lost the Battle of Jena. They lost the Battle of the Marne. They lost the Battle of Stalingrad. And now they've lost the battle of the business magazines.
Katharine Seelye reports in The New York Times:
Gruner & Jahr, a division of the German media giant Bertelsmann, is expected to announce today that it has reached an agreement to sell its two American business magazines, Inc. and Fast Company, for about $35 million, a fraction of what it paid for the publications. . . .Gruner & Jahr bought both magazines five years ago for $550 million - Inc. from Bernard Goldhirsch for $200 million and Fast Company from Mortimer Zuckerman for $350 million
How do you say, "I can't believe we lost $515 million on two f****** magazines" in German?
Posted by dan at 03:18 PM
The upfront season, in which TV networks try to get the peddlers of cars, cookies, and colas to buy gigantic chunks of advertising time on lame sitcoms and crime-scene/legal dramas, has just come to a close.
And the big loser is. . . . .GE's NBC.
From yesterday's Wall Street Journal article by Brian Steinberg.
Dragging down the market was General Electric's NBC, which is expected to suffer about a 30% drop in so-called upfront commitments for the fall prime-time season. NBC, which has completed 95% of its upfront negotiations, expects to secure $1.9 billion to $2 billion in commitments from advertisers, according to a person familiar with the situation. Last year, NBC landed about $2.9 billion of upfront commitments.
Contributing to NBC's upfront decline was its decision to sell only about 75% of its ad inventory in the upfront season, holding back the rest for sale later in the year. Typically it had sold about 80%. Still, even taking this into account, NBC's upfront decline was worse than predicted on Wall Street. It reflects both NBC's slump in ratings in the past season and advertisers rethinking the amount of money they commit to television.
Now that Phil Purcell has gone, maybe Intrade can start selling a futures contract on Jeff Zucker's executive tenure.
Posted by dan at 02:45 PM
Maytag has officially been offered a China Price.
Posted by dan at 02:41 PM
Hey, it’s sane commentator day at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Take note, it only comes around once a month.
Roger Altman, the former deputy Clinton Treasury Secretary and head of Evercore Partners, advances the savings glut meme. In his op-ed piece, he calls it, “excess global liquidity.” Our interest rates stand at record lows because the global liquidity glut has “nowhere else to go but into dollar-denominated fixed-income assts like U.S. Treasury securities.”
Extra: Brad DeLong prefers to call it a “worldwide investment shortfall.”
While I defer to Prof. DeLong on all matters economic, I still like the ring, or rather the thud, of “glut.”
Posted by dan at 02:38 PM
Another step in the long decline of CNN as a serious global news organization. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that CNN will be helping with the marketing of a new HBO film, The Girl in the Cafe.
CNN, which like HBO is owned by Time Warner, will run 25 minutes of clips from the film as part of the network's reporting and as part of an hourlong special on the film. That will be followed by what is certainly a coup for Time Warner's cross-platform marketing: Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain (who received an advance copy of the film) will be interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on the subject of global poverty, followed by a filmed segment of Ms. Amanpour reporting from an impoverished village in Ethiopia.The film, a romantic comedy by the British screenwriter Richard Curtis, who wrote "Four Weddings and a Funeral," involves a naïve young woman named Gina who shames world leaders at a fictional Group of 8 summit meeting into adopting goals to end world poverty. Gina, played by Kelly Macdonald, above, is invited to accompany Lawrence, a British civil servant played by Bill Nighy, also above, to the meeting.
Yes, CNN is airing a one hour program devoted to a film that can only be seen by the millions of Americans who subscribe to HBO. What's next, a three-hour Larry King special on the making of Entourage? Why not just turnover the whole network to Time Warner infomercials? It probably wouldn't hurt ratings.
Posted by dan at 12:24 PM
For columnists of a certain stripe, the fiscal policies of the last several years present a remarkably uncomfortable dilemma. They can read the numbers, and they know that a Republican President, working with a Republican Congress, has massively increased government spending, piled on hundreds of billions of new debt every year, and created a gigantic massive open-ended entitlement program (prescription drugs under Medicare.) And all without the participation of Democrats.
The intellectually honest response would be to call out the Republicans for betraying their campaign promises over, and strating to come to grips that today's Republicans are the party of big government.
Instead, we get fare like today's Amity Shlaes column in the Financial Times. In her column on deficit-obsessed Blue Dog Democrats, whom she generally applauds, Shlaes makes nods to the Republicans' role in creating the nation's fiscal mess, and then deftly lays the blame where it really belongs: on the Congressional Democrats.
"There are flaws in the Blue Dog position," she writes. "The first is the reality that, given control of both houses and the executive, the Democrats would outspend even the piggiest Republican Congress."
Um, no, no that's not "reality." That's a hypothetical, or more appropriately, a counterfactual argument. And even as a hypothetical or a counterfactual, it's simply wrong. The last time the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the executive was in 1993, when, over the shrieks of everybody on the right side of the aisle, President Clinton and a Democratic-contolled Congress passed a budget that started to address in a systematic the orgy of debt run up in the 1980s and early 1990s. Oh, and it worked. We had years of above-trend growth and deficit reduction.
No, the reality is something quite different, and it's something that the partisan econo-sphere still can't bring itself to face squarely.
Posted by dan at 08:35 AM
Yesterday's bubble (websites that allow people to conduct commerce online) and today's bubble (the Miami condo market) come together.
Introducing, CondoFlip.com.
Posted by dan at 08:16 AM