The private equity firm Platinum Equity announced last week they had offered to buy Johnson & Johnson’s blood glucose monitoring product for about $2.1 billion. The LifeScan Inc unit was one of several J&J businesses focused on diabetes devices. The medical products giant had apparently experienced declining revenues and squeezed margins in that arena and…
News reached us last weekend of an incredible message-in-the-bottle story. Turns out a woman strolling a beach in Western Australia found a bottle that, it was later discovered, had been tossed overboard from a German merchant ship in 1886. Further research by a museum curator revealed that a Captain O. Dieckmann of the Paula had…
Ten years ago Churchill launched a weekly internal newsletter called “On The Left.” The world of March 2008 was a very different place. The demise of Bear Stearns would happen that month. Lehman Brothers would fall six months after that. Each day’s business headlines were scarier than the day before. Keeping our management and originators…
We tend to be a late adopter of cultural phenomena, so our appreciation of curling was understandably delayed. A sport that plays like shuffleboard, tosses around terms like hack and hog line, and employs practitioners who carry brooms, is a tough sell. But thanks to relentless Olympic coverage, the US men winning a first-time ever…
We knew Disney World would involve some long lines. Even with Fast Passes, it’s tough to zip through everything. And with three young girls in tow (two daughters and a friend), flexibility is key. The surprise was the four-hour wait at one Disney destination that’s not on the usual tour: the Buena Vista Urgent Care…
It seemed like a one-in-a-million shot at the time. In October 2014, the LSTA filed a lawsuit against the SEC and the Federal Reserve Board, claiming that CLOs should not be covered under Dodd-Frank’s risk retention rules. These rules, arising from the credit crisis, required parties that securitized assets to retain at least 5% equity…
The 21st century and our prehistoric past met near a parking lot at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center. An amateur paleontologist spotted dinosaur tracks at the Greenbelt, MD facility, in an area slated for demolition to make room for an office building. Once unearthed, a 8.5 foot long sandstone slab revealed more than eighty prints of…
“The world is going up in a straight line, but for how long?” Such was one Euro banker’s query from the lofty aerie at the Davos World Economic Forum. Despite potential global worries including terrorism, nationalism, and bubblism, the mood was buoyant. “There’s always things to worry about,’ said another, “but not a lot until…
In case our readers missed the reference of our series title, the joke goes like this: Mel and Harry are lunching at a diner. ”The food here stinks,” Mel complains. “Overcooked, expensive, and no taste.” “Yeah,” Harry says. “And such small portions!” We’ve invoke this old chestnut as a metaphor for the state of middle…
Last fall we ran a special series on the size of the middle middle for loans (“How Big is the Middle Market”). This week we re-examine that question with Kelly Thompson, the middle market analyst for LevFin Insights. In a recent report, Kelly discussed both the volume of middle market loan activity in 2017 as…