By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – It's Friday so "It's Only Money," a review of the big and not-so-big stories of the week. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
When you're as big as General Electric, Wal-Mart or Microsoft - to use a phrase by my old company - when they talk, people listen. Well, today GE announced its year-end earnings will be 3 percent under earlier expectations, and its third-quarter profits fell 11 percent due to some one-time charges. GE, owners of NBC, and soon-to-be owners of one-third of every other media outlet after their merger with Vivendi, are faulting its cyclical industrial businesses not NBC. But it's all about mergers and acquisitions for them this week. Besides the union with Vivendi Universal, today it was revealed GE is buying a British pharmaceutical company - Amersham - for a mere $9.5 billion in stock. Guess they didn't feel they were diversified enough.
And Wal-Mart, in a more positive move to save a buck, has gotten the go-ahead to make McKinney the home for an eco-friendly experimental retail center, only one of two in the nation. How 'bout that? According to the Dallas Morning News, "it'll feature 120-foot-tall electricity-generating windmill, (I'm sure GE will love to hear that), solar panels and a water recycling system to collect, cleanse and reuse run-off and rainwater." They never cease to amaze me.
Now if you at all care or watch what top executives are doing with their company stock, you need to listen up. In the third-quarter, corporate insider buying totaled about $240 million. That's piddling - we'd have to go back to the fourth quarter in 1994 to find that small an amount of buying. So how much did they sell? $8.7 billion worth of company stock. That made the sell-buy ratio 36-to-1, making it the most bearish in the ten years since Thomas Financial has been keeping these records. In the meantime, the NASDAQ's close yesterday was up almost 72 percent from a year earlier. Go figure. For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m.
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