Obviously the majority of folks who've posted here are much more well informed on politics than you are on the market.
1. Kmart is not French-owned. It's publicly traded, and if you want to see who owns the largest shares of their stock, it's pretty easily found out by opening a proxy report and reading it. But since there are those of you who are too lazy to do that, I'll tell you that 53% of the shares are owned by board members.
2. Sears is the 2nd most successful retail organization in the country, behind Walmart. Target is doing quite well also, but Sears has a much better footprint in a lot of areas that Target doesn't exist yet.
This buy-out (it will be Sears buying Kmart, after all) will provide Sears with the opportunity to go head-to-head against Walmart in markets where their current stores just are too small to compete. In addition, it allows the larger Sears stores to not have to play the 'discount' game where they have to have sales every week just to attract customers. This should be a win all around, other than in the boardroom in Troy Michigan (Kmart HQ) where most of those idiots will be canned, appropriately so after they drove Kmart to bankruptcy.
Please direct your comments to the correct poster.
Actually I think they'll be going more after Target/ Mervyns than WalMart. This will give them basically the same two layered business model to improve their power buying by getting both low-end and mid-range products from their suppliers. It's worked really well for Target, almost too well (remember when Target was part of Mervyns, now it seems like the other way around).