Remember the 1980s oil & gas partnerships? Large E&P firms would pocket investor’s cash to shell out for leases, acrage, and the assorted equipment necessary to drill. The sky-high upfront leasing costs made sense only to investors with graphs prediction ever-rising energy prices. At the time, such pie-in-the-sky numbers looked like consensus. It was only when oil prices collapsed that in retrospect the O&G partnerships, as construed as an asset class, looked foolish. The losses were so steep, and the damage so widespread, that it took more than a decade before the Wall Street underwriting machine was able to lure the marks (er, clients) back into the business.
One of the more interesting M&A deals in the works was leaked almost a month ago by Bloomberg. In a story published at the beginning of November, Bloomberg writers Jeffrey McCracken and Cathy Chan tipped us off to the fact that Sonosite (Nasdaq: SONO) had hired JP Morgan to rep them in a possible sale of the company to Samsung. Read more
Do the plaintiff attourneys suing Harbin Electric (Nasdaq: HRBN) know more about the risk of Harbin’s $24-per-share acquisition closing than the rest of the market? It sure seems so. Read more
