Bloomberg General Motors Co.’s hot-selling new crossovers are padding profit for the largest US automaker amid a costly retooling of truck factories and restructuring of Korean operations. Adjusted earnings fell to $1.43 a share in the first quarter, beating analysts’ average estimate for $1.24. The Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain drove better-than-expected revenue and buoyed GM through downtime at pickup ...
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CVS ‘moving forward’ with Aetna deal as profit rises
Bloomberg CVS Health Corp. said it’s making progress in the regulatory review of its $68 billion deal to buy health insurer Aetna Inc. after first-quarter earnings came in higher than analysts anticipated. Both CVS and rival Express Scripts Holding Co. are trying to get their mega mergers approved by regulators, as drug middlemen combine with large insurers in the US ...
Read More »Xerox boss steps down putting $6.1bn Fujifilm deal in limbo
Bloomberg Xerox Corp.’s top executive and six board members agreed to step down in a victory for Carl Icahn’s battle against the company’s planned $6.1 billion takeover by Fujifilm Holdings Corp. The resignations, which include Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Jacobson and Chairman Robert Keegan, are part of an agreement with activist investors to settle a lawsuit that will put in ...
Read More »The myth that markets get prices right won’t die
At this point, the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) makes for an easy rhetorical target. Precious few economists and financial professionals are willing to stand up in public anymore and assert that financial markets produce the best estimate of fundamental asset values. A series of enormous bubbles, plus decades of outsized profits for hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies, has turned into ...
Read More »Boeing to drive a harder bargain later
Boeing Co. is signaling it won’t take on extra baggage in its pursuit of a bigger services division, but it will still have to pay up to build one. The planemaker acquired KLX Inc. for $63 a share, or about $4.25 billion including debt. The catch is that Boeing is only buying KLX’s aerospace business, which distributes parts and provides ...
Read More »Allergan may need much more than a minor facelift
In just about two years, Allergan PLC has gone from a pharma darling on the verge of a massively lucrative Pfizer Inc. buyout to something of a pariah. Its stock has fallen 38 percent in the past nine months. Shareholders are reportedly recruiting activists. On its first-quarter earnings call on Monday, Allergan said it is in the midst of an ...
Read More »International tourists are US’s renewable resource
President Donald Trump has made clear his view that the US doesn’t need any more immigrants. The mystery is why a veteran of the hospitality business would be so inhospitable to tourists, traveling executives, students and other visitors. Consider the State Department’s ill-advised plan to impose new screening requirements on the roughly 14 million people who apply each year for ...
Read More »Is India’s oil addiction again undermining its economy?
From about the beginning of 2017, even skeptics had to admit, India looked to be recovering from a growth slowdown. Most dramatically, in the last two quarters for which data is available, investment in physical capital — which had long been too low for growth to recover — increased by 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively. In the first two ...
Read More »SoftBank sans telcos means Masayoshi has little to offer
Finally. Get used to hearing that word a lot when people talk about the merger of Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. For SoftBank Group Corp. and its founder Masayoshi Son, that sigh of relief also needs a rejoinder: now what? In addition to successfully selling his unprofitable US telco, Son this year is on track to list the company’s ...
Read More »Actually, equality is a mediocre goal. Aim for the progress
There are numerous takes on what made the Western world special during the era after World War II, including an especially large middle class, many years of peace and American hegemony. I’d like to nominate another candidate, namely that there was a rough correspondence between the major risks out there and the risks that government could afford to insure us ...
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