24/7 Wall St. will name its annual CEO of the Year next week. The executive will be picked from a field of ten which we will profile this week.
The CEOs are chosen on the basis of their company’s stock market and financial performances compared with their own industry groups and all large companies traded on US markets. Only firms with market caps of more than $5 billion were considered. 24/7 reviewed revenue growth, operating margins, balance sheets, return on assets, and return on equity
It makes a certain amount of sense. The Huffington Post has raised $25 million at a valuation that the media is putting at $115 million. TheStreet.com (TSCM), which is public, has a market cap of $100 million, but it has $80 million in cash and marketable securities. In other words, it has a lot more money in the bank than Huffington does.
The company’s figures bear out the valuations to some extent, but the Huffington number says more about its future than it does its present.
According to both Compete and Alexa, Huffington has about twice as many unique visitors as TheStreet. Compete puts that number at 5.4 million for Huffington and 3.1 million for TSCM as of October.
Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) has just come out with guidance for the end of its quarter. As you might have guessed before reading any further, it lowered guidance. Lower guidance is one thing, but this looks significantly lower than anything you might have guessed.
Gradualism may end up being the failing global economy’s worst enemy. Many analysts don’t think that the Paulson plan’s $700 billion war chest was enough. Obama’s economic team may have to go back to Congress for more.
The Fed has cut rates, but why hasn’t it cut them faster? The same question can be asked of any major central bank in the world. China only announced its huge stimulus package two weeks ago. There have been signs of a slowing in that country for months. Today, the Chinese government admitted that the drop-off in production within the country was unprecedented.
Ben Bernanke says he has more ammo to use to combat the US slowdown. It is a little late for show-and-tell.
Harvard is the richest university in America. Last month, its endowment value was pegged at $37 billion.
But, the managers of that pot are panicking like rookies, hitting the exits trying to dump its holdings in private equity funds.
As if you did not notice, the US economy is in a recession. We have been maintaining that for just about the whole of 2008. Now today we have the official data from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The NBER said its Business Cycle Dating Committee determined that the U.S. entered recession in December 2007.
It is already December and it is time for corporations to have at least started their reviews for how to improve in 2009. Those reviews will involve many management reviews, and many companies would do better with a new CEO. General Motors Corporation (NYSE: GM) may seem like too easy of a pick to start out with on a list of companies which need to replace their CEO. But Rick Wagoner needs to leave GM for a number of reasons. Unfortunately for Mr. Wagoner, GM is likely going to need to remove him from the CEO role and from the Chairman role. This is not just over what has happened in the past. What lies ahead for GM is a rocky road that will require new leadership and swifter actions.
Most industries get to spread out their bad news. The current exceptions appear to be the automotive and banking sectors.Some days they can be hit from three or four sides.
An impression that the credit markets will still get worse has pushed Morgan Stanley (MS) down 18% today to $12 and Citigroup (C) off by 12% to $7.28.
The ISM Manufacturing report was as dismal as one could expect and definitely well into the recession levels for those who have been on the fence. The Institute for Supply Management showed that manufacturing activity in the U.S. declined at probably the worst since 1982.
24/7 Wall St. will name its annual CEO of the Year next week. The executive will be picked from a field of ten which we will profile this week.
The CEOs are chosen on the basis of their company’s stock market and financial performances compared with their own industry groups and all large companies traded on US markets. Only firms with market caps of more than $5 billion were considered. 24/7 reviewed revenue growth, operating margins, balance sheets, return on assets, and return on equity.
Chesapeake Energy Corp. (NYSE:CHK) filed three documents with the SEC on Friday. One replaces a shelf registration that expires on December 5, the second authorizes the issuance of up to 50 million shares of Chesapeake stock "in connection with the acquisition of assets, businesses or securities of other companies," and the third extends an agreement with three of its sales agents to sell up to $1 billion in shares in 2009 and beyond. Chesapeake shares dived more than 15% on the news. The first and third of these filings are pretty normal. The second,however, leaps off the page.
Citigroup commented on General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) ahead of tomorrow’s GE Capital webcast. The firm said the webcast could be a forum to lower its 2009 outlook.
The analysts noted that in prior years, when street estimates were too high, GE held late November/Early December meetings and used them as a forum to lower expectations so the CEO could focus more on strategy, etc as the late-December meeting. The firm said the likelihood of this being the case this year appears reasonably high given the short notice on the webcast (announced on 11/25) and the unprecedented macro and financial upheaval.
By John Tamny, RealClearMarkets
Amid the tumult in the U.S. banking and manufacturing sectors, there’s been lots of apocalyptic talk about how the failure of certain banks or companies could drive the economy into a permanent ditch. According to certain politicians, economists and pundits, if the government fails to use money taken from the private sector in order to shore up the health of that same private sector, the U.S. economy will simply stop growing.
The UN’s report on World Economic Situation and Prospects 2009 contains almost no good news.
According to Reuters, "World economic growth will slow to 1 percent in 2009 from 2.5 percent this year as the financial crisis bites and the global economy may even contract if stimulus packages prove too little too late."
With emerging markets like China and India still showing GDP improvements, that means numbers in the US, EU, and Japan are bound to get a good deal worse.
Douglas A. McIntyre
If you thought that high-premium buyouts or M&A was dead, that is not the case in at least some opportunities. Mentor Corp. (NYSE: MNT) has just secured a major premium buyout this Monday morning with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) as the suitor.
It is looking fairly quiet on the analyst research front this Monday morning. Here are today’s early bird upgrades and downgrades from Wall Street analysts:
Jon C. Ogg
December 1, 2008
Management of companies in the retail sector are waking up to sunny skies today.
Evidence is that Black Friday sales moved up 3% over last year.
But sales are not profits, and that is one piece of the puzzle which seems to have been lost.
There is something to be said for giving nearly everyone a lot of access to credit when the economy and real estate values are improving. If consumers don’t have a ready way to find cash to pay down card balances because their wages are not improving, they can always tap into the value of their homes.
Banks made good money off the interest rates they charge and GDP expansion kept default rates down to a dull roar.
China’s GDP is going to do remarkably well over the next year. No, it is in real trouble. Maybe both statements are true, but that would defy logic, at least the brand that economists use.
Over the weekend, China’s president said that the global recession could hurt his county’s growth which might lead it to become less competitive as the world’s largest supplier of goods.
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