In the past week, a number of leveraged buyout transactions have fallen apart, whether temporarily or permanently one cannot yet say. The Alliance/Boots buyout in Britain, Cadbury Schweppes’ sale of its US drinks business and the Chrysler buyout in the US are just the best-known examples of multi-billion dollar transactions that can’t currently get completed. […]

Negative earnings surprises by Pfizer and Caterpillar at the end of last week may indicate a new reality: the income premium for bring a Westerner and having access to the centuries of Western intellectual property and business acumen may be sharply diminishing. We can all rejoice as poor and middle income countries are brought up […]

The market and media view about the mining giant Rio Tinto’s $44 billion bid for the Canadian aluminum company Alcan is that the buyer overpaid. It’s generally believed that commodity prices are close to the top of the cycle, so Alcan earnings can be expected to decline going forward. Certainly Alcoa, the other bidder for […]

“We’re going to become the first African tiger” said Ghana’s President John Kufuor when hearing that a British –U.S. consortium had struck oil. Is that realistic, or is Africa a permanent basket case? And if it is realistic, what would such a development mean for the rest of us?