Buying DreamWorks, and Waiting for Greenspan

Yahoo! Finance and The Week (The Best of Today's Business) ^ | December 12, 2005 | The Best of Today's Business

[Sonny M]

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Paramount makes a deal

Paramount Pictures Corp. announced it is buying DreamWorks SKG, the movie studio founded by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Paramount plans to offset the $1.6-billion cost by selling a 59-film DreamWorks library that includes Oscar winners American Beauty and Gladiator. Paramount swooped in at the last-minute after a DreamWorks deal with NBC Universal stalled. "I can't stress how transforming an event this is," said Paramount Chairman Brad Gray. (Los Angeles Times, free registration required)

Conoco goes shopping

ConocoPhillips is negotiating to buy oil and gas producer Burlington Resources for more than $30 billion. If the deal goes through, it will boost Conoco's natural-gas production in North America. Record prices have sparked new exploration in "unconventional" fields in the U.S. and Canada, where gas is expensive to tap because it is trapped in rocky formations. (The Wall Street Journal, paid registration required)

Family-friendly cable

A cable-TV industry trade group is expected to announce today that cable companies will offer "tiers" of family-friendly channels to help parents keep shows with violent and sexual content out of their homes. Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, will give details at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on indecency in television and radio. (The Washington Post, free registration required)

Delta avoids strike

Delta Airlines pilots agreed to take a 14-percent pay cut in a deal that could save the nation's struggling third-largest carrier $152 million a year. Delta had asked a bankruptcy court to impose deeper concessions before the pilots' union approved a strike several days ago. Delta Chief Financial Officer Ed Bastian said the new agreement would "help save the company." (AP on Yahoo! Finance)

BEST COLUMNS OF THE DAY

Changing language

The "word junkies" are about to get their "fix," says Caroline Baum in Bloomberg.com. It is a foregone conclusion that the Fed will hike interest rates another quarter percent at its meeting tomorrow. But observers will scrutinize every "tense change" and "added adjectival modifier" in the accompanying statement to determine whether the end of outgoing Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's campaign to tame inflation by hiking short-term rates is "drawing nigh."

Break up Time Warner

Carl Icahn is right, says America Online co-founder Steve Case in The Washington Post. The billionaire investor has been pushing to split up the media giant Time Warner. But even before Icahn bought a big stake in the company, it was clear that Time Warner's merger with AOL hadn't worked out. "I played a key role in bringing AOL and Time Warner together" six years ago, but the deal never yielded the "expected benefits" for Time Warner. It also "weighed AOL down, while its competitors, such as Google and Yahoo, have made important strides forward."

GOOD DAY FOR: Being average, as an analyst estimated that year-end bonuses would bring this year's compensation to $510,000 for the average employee at Goldman Sachs, one of three leading Wall Street banks announcing earnings this week. (Financial Times)

BAD DAY FOR: New beginnings, as less than 10 percent of the 20 million to 50 million tons of electronics equipment discarded every year gets recycled. (The Washington Post)

NOTED: With natural gas prices soaring, sales of wood stoves are booming. Sales of stoves -- especially those that burn wood and wood pellets -- were up 82 percent in October over a year earlier. (The New York Times)

[SteveMcKing]

Three of the most evil men in America.