Back in December, I wasn’t a fan of Apple buying back its stock. I’m still not a fan, despite the fact that Apple stock has dropped 40% since then and the fact that Arik Hesseldahl says that a buyback is a very good idea: "word of a buyback would probably give the stock price the kind of upward lift it needs," he says.
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Applera Corporation had an SEC Filing today saying its Board of Directors has authorized management to pursue a possible separation of the Celera Group (NYSE:CRA) from Applera. The completion of this proposal is subject to conditions such as final Board approval, SEC clearance of the registration, receipt of an opinion of a tax-free status, and more. One interesting issue here is that approval by Applera stockholders is not required. This separation would be via a one-for-one redemption of the Applera Corporation-Celera Group tracking stock for new Celera Corporation shares. These will still keep the “CRA” ticker, but it would be…
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Halfway through today’s session, investors probably wish they could have leapt over Leap Day, which has historically been a pretty good one in the market. According to the Stock Market Almanac, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index had a 60.4% chance of rising today – which is based on the number of times the market has risen on that given day between 1954 and 2006.
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Mortgage losses, compounded by contemporary risk management and accounting practices could prompt banks and other lenders to shrink their lending and other assets by a staggering $2 trillion, a new study concludes.
The resulting withdrawal of credit could knock one to 1.5 percentage points off economic growth, significantly compounding the impact of collapsing home construction and softer consumer spending due to lower home wealth, the study, presented at a joint academic-Wall Street forum in New York Friday.
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How irrational is our love of Free Stuff? Dan Ariely runs a thought experiment:
Consider how long you would be willing to stand in line for a free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone. Let’s assume that your answer is 20 minutes and that the cost of a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone is $1.45. Now answer this: would you be willing to stand in line for 20 minutes for $1.45 in cash? No way.
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Has all the good news on bond insurers improved the auction rate municipal bond market? Taking another look at the results of J.P. Morgan’s auctions reveals that the ARS market is indeed thawing a bit. Morgan held 103 bond auctions on Tuesday, 47 of which failed. Looking a little deeper, however, and we see that all the failed auctions occurred where the bond had a relatively low “max rate.” Remember that when an auction fails, there is some pre-determined rate at which the bond resets….
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The president tapped Henry Paulson as U.S. Treasury Secretary to deal with a sagging economy, social security and tax reform. But if he had spare time and maybe even more political sway, there might be one additional challenge the former Goldman Sachs executive would like to tackle: eliminating the penny.
I don’t think I persuaded many people with my 5,550-word defense of vulture funds this time last year. Maybe Kambiz Foroohar will have better luck, with his heartwarming story of vulture funds saving homeowners from foreclosure. Or, you know, maybe not.
As if MBIA and Ambac Financial needed more salt in their wounds.
The vultures are pecking at the bond insurance industry, and while Warren Buffett is hanging a shingle, distressed-sector specialist Wilbur Ross has o…
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What happens when you cross a creative industry with a private-equity shop? Ask Guy Hands, who just bought EMI:
What we are doing is taking the power away from the A&R guys and putting it with the suits - the guys who have to work out how to sell music. Trying to persuade 260 people to give up their power has been hard.
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Sirius Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: SIRI) and XM Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: XMSR) hav extended their merger agreement to May 1, 2008. As a reminder, Jim Cramer recently called out all the congressmen that he felt were unfairly holding this merger up. Originally, the companies could walk away from the deal after March 1, 2008. After all, this has been “a pending merger” for more than a year now. These two companies are still waiting for regulatory approval from the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. Sirius was down $0.07 to $2.85 and XM was down $0.45 to $11.65 on…
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It is, officially, on.
A dissident investor stepped up pressure on The New York Times Co. Friday, formally proposing its own slate of four directors and saying the company needs to take more drastic action to compete online.
Harbinger Capital, an investment firm that now owns about 19 percent of the company, filed its own proxy statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission listing its nominees for directors to be elected at the Times’ annual meeting April 22.
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Remember the panic which ensued when comScore announced that Google’s paid-click rate was declining? Henry Blodget went so far as to call it a "Google Disaster", and the shares plunged.
But it turns out that the comScore data aren’t nearly as disastrous as they might look at first blush. The company has a long blog entry ont the subject which explains that it very much looks as though G…
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Point Asset Management, Inc. has filed to sell up to $250 million in an initial public offering and it will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “PNT.” Deutsche Bank is listed as the sole underwriter as of now. It will also be qualified as a REIT, so ownership of common stock by any person is generally limited to 9.8% in value or in number of shares. It will also be externally managed by Federated Investment Counseling, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Federated Investors Inc. (NYSE:FII). Point Asset Management, Inc. is a Maryland corporation that will invest…
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Jon Jacobs wants "an unrestrained, cathartic selloff" in the credit markets. He makes a good point: that banks are holding on to the assets they’ve written down in the hope, basically, that they’re smarter than the markets.
The only way bank executives can be proven right in refusing to dump their bad bets is if they know more than the market. And you don’t have to believe in efficient markets to believe the market is more likely right than some of the players who are caught in what now looks like a losing trade. Remember: Even if the market is wrong, it could be wrong in the opposite direction - high-risk loans and structures could ultimately turn out to be worth less than the market is now paying.
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Get ready folks. Looks like there’s some ol fashioned proxy wrastlin’ brewing down yonder at the NYT:
A dissident investor stepped up pressure on The New York Times Co. Friday, formally proposing its own slate of four directors and saying the company needs to take more drastic action to compete online.
Harbinger Capital, an investment firm that now owns about 19 percent of the company, filed its own proxy statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission listing its nominees for directors to be elected at the Times’ annual meeting April 22.
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The way it used to go on Wall Street was as follows: Release some really bad news about forthcoming earnings and let the market freak out for a while. Then, follow that up a few weeks later by clearing the exceedingly low bar set and watch as investors buy shares, feeling a bit better about what’s transpired.
The new way? Release some bad news, engender a freakout, and then come back a few weeks later with even worse news…
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