On FT Alphaville this morning,
- Capital Chronicle blogger RJH Adam has alighted on Chuck Prince’s recent interview in the FT, noting: “This interview is perhaps the perfect tour d’horizon of the actual state of liquidity affairs from any big lender’s perspective: it may end badly but they are compelled to play.”
- The debate about private equity raging on both sides of the Atlantic has just intensified a notch in the US, as the industry there launches what some describe as its first serious attempt to hit back at criticism.
- Meanwhile, this side of the pond, in the high-profile run-off between British politicians on the Treasury select committee and the heavyweights of the private equity world, the industry has been granted something of a reprieve. The inquiry will now publish only an interim report before the summer recess, expected to consist mainly of factual evidence, while the full report will not appear until after parliament returns in October with the committee likely to hold further hearings.
- We were already sitting up and taking notice. Dubai International Capital has, after all, snapped up a “substantial” stake in HSBC and then taken a 3.12 per cent holding in EADS over the past couple of months. A restructuring of DIC, announced on Wednesday, will see the investment arm of Dubai Holding broken into four divisions to “empower the firm to have a more specialised approach to its international as well as regional investments.”
On FT.com this morning,
- Moneysupermarket on Wednesday priced this month’s planned share offering at between 170p and 210p, raising £388m at the mid-point of that range and valuing the entire share capital of the price comparison website at just under £1bn. The company plans to sell about 40 per cent of its shares to pay off debt and release capital for its senior management team, which includes Simon Nixon, a co-founder of the website, which was founded in 1999.
- Tokyo shares tumbled to their lowest close in two weeks on Wednesday, battered by an overnight tumble in US stock markets and the yen hitting a one-month high against the dollar. The benchmark Nikkei 225 average ended the trading day off 1.1 per cent at 18,049.51, while the broader Topix index was down 1.2 per cent at 1,767.72.
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