There is a good tale from team Bloomborg knocking around the wires this morning about one of the City's favourite sandwich shops, Pret a Manger, hiring banks for an IPO. Here is the link in case you missed it:
When I was a young reporter on The Daily Telegraph in the mid noughties working a late shift I was somewhat bamboozled by the first editions of the Daily Mail and The Daily Express.
Why?
Well, that's because the front page (of the main book) of one those newspapers led with a story about how prices are set to soar while the other claimed on the front page (of the main book, too) that houses prices were set to crash...
Two days on and the upper echelons of the financial media world are still picking over the carcass of the failed Kraft Heinz / 3G / Warren Buffett / Unilever deal.
Probably the best newspaper piece out there is the "tick tock" by Arash Massoudi and James Fontanella-Kahn in today's Financial Times. Here is the link in case you haven't read it:..
This is piece (see below) from Bloomberg is a great read and demonstrates how hedge funds found an interesting "edge" on the $30 billion Johnson & Johnson / Actelion deal.
A lot has been written about "fake news" over the last month so but how about ruminating on the growing amount of duff - or perhaps we should call them "fake" - denials.
Today, for example, French aerospace company Safran announced it is buying rival Zodiac Aerospace for EURO 8.5 billion...
Actelion is currently up just over 15pc and various hacks are claiming the "scoop" despite the fact the story hasn't even made into hard newsprint yet in one of the "newspapers of record" (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph etc) or been confirmed by the Swiss company itself...
I see Bloomberg was today badgering Dr Severin Schwan, the Roche chief executive, into providing a denial to my BioMarin story from a few weeks ago.
According to the Bloomberg story I read today, Dr Schwan said Roche was looking at small to medium-sized acquistions although he believes biotech valuations are "too high" even after the recent market correction...