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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
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Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
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Be Your Own Counterfeiter
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Being Tim Geithner
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Notes From a Press Conference Naif
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What Good is the News?
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Stressful Enough
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Not Regretting the Pound
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Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
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Non-Economic Questions of the Day
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The Stress Test Blind Alley
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Happy Hour
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Recovery Without Rebalancing
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The Shape of Your Recession
Apr 23 20095:04pm EDT
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The Fight for Yahoo
The more I think about it, the more I like this idea of a joint bid for Yahoo from Microsoft and News Corp. The bits of Yahoo which Microsoft doesn't want - call them "content", if you like - are precisely the bits which Murdoch would love. Meanwhile, as Sam Gustin points out, the Yahoo-AOL-Google rival approach seems to have a zero chance of passing regulatory muster.
The whole situation reminds me weirdly of the fight for ABN Amro. The deal that the target company wanted, with Barclays, never worked out, partly because Barclays stock was about as healthy as Time Warner's. In the end the bank got sold to a consortium of strategic bidders: an approach which managed to multiply synergies.
The biggest winners of all in that deal, of course, were ABN's shareholders, which means that anybody holding Yahoo on Wednesday night is waking up smiling on Thursday. It's still conceivable Yahoo will be sold for $31 a share; it's pretty much unthinkable at this point it will be sold for any less. And it might well now go for significantly more. Expect the risk-arbs to have a lot of fun today.
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