“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated,” Chuck Prince (former Citi CEO) said in 2007. “But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” . UK house prices are up another +10.9% according to the Nationwide and stock indices the […]
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Nil premium mergers are tough to complete, particularly when a stretched balance sheet forces it to be funded with equity at a time when debt is cheap. This is due to the target company exposing itself as up for sale, but unable to offer its shareholders a control premium beyond some nebulous longer term shared […]
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Investing can sometimes feel like quantum physics, where there is no reality, but just a probability of outcomes. While valuing a potentially miss-priced asset on an existing consensus perception of reality is one challenge, this is a mere entree to the broader problem that the future is unlikely to pan out as per the current […]
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I’ll say this for new CEO, John Stankey, he’s got balls to spin off the $100bn Warner Media business his predecessor had bought only back in mid 2018. Presumably given John had managed the business briefly ahead of being elevated to COO and then to CEO, he either didn’t like what he saw, or saw […]
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Someone didn’t seem to get the memo from Macron that French culture and particularly, ‘French exceptionalism’ is no longer de rigeuer and once again corporate France has retreated back to a defensive consolidation along nationalism lines. So much for a sense of European identity. On the positive side, consolidating two commercial TV operators in the […]
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Oh it’s such fun to see the Fed being played, if not by the government, then by the banks! Now however, both interests are aligned in attempting to persuade Fed Chairman Powell to keep the monetary punch bowl well filled, or risk yet another market ‘hissy-fit’. Hence the management of expectations for an entirely unreasonable […]
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So is Good news now good for asset prices? For the last decade and particularly the last year however, its been more a case of multiple expansion driven by central bank/Govt money printing rather than rising returns that have been responsible for this asset inflation, so why would another month of robust growth in US […]
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“voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” Change ‘pacifists’ […]
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