Junior telco M2 Telecommunications Group (ASX: MTU) and struggling broadband provider People Telecom (ASX: PEO) have announced a friendly merger, which will see M2 acquire all of the smaller company's...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CEOs of General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC said they would consider restarting talks about a merger during a nearly six-hour congressional grilling on the industry's pleas for $34 billion in government aid.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.reuters.com/~f/reuters/topNews?a=QPtIl2Uw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/topNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.reuters.com/~f/reuters/topNews?a=zEcv6GzC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/topNews?i=zEcv6GzC" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.reuters.com/~f/reuters/topNews?a=txxy7d2Y"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/topNews?i=txxy7d2Y" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reuters/topNews/~4/uuJG3Y6texE" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/24045?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+Banks+urged+to+pass+on+historic+cutch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=Interest+rates+%28Business%29%2CBank+of+England+%28Business%29%2CRecession+%28UK%29%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2COil+and+gas+companies+%28Business%29%2CManufacturing+sector+%28Business%29%2CHouse+prices+%28Money%29%2CMoney%2CBusiness%2CEconomic+policy%2CEconomics+%28Business%29%2CPoliticsc5=Personal+Finance%2CCredit+Crunch%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Markets%2CProperty+Mortgages+and+Interest+Ratesc6=Ashley+Seager%2CLarry+Elliottc7=2008_12_05c8=1129242c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=Interest+ratesc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FInterest+rates" width="1" height="1" //divpBritain's bailed-out high street banks risked the wrath of the government last night after they refused to pass on to all their mortgage customers the full benefits of the Bank of England's decision to cut borrowing costs to the lowest level since 1951./ppDespite joint pressure from Gordon Brown and the chancellor Alistair Darling to match the one percentage point reduction in the bank rate to 2%, both the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Halifax said their standard variable rates (SVR) would not be reduced by the full amount. /ppHalifax, Britain's biggest mortgage lender, said it would trim only a quarter point off its SVR home loan although customers on tracker mortgages would receive the cut in full, worth pound;82 a month on a pound;150,000 mortgage. RBS said it would "strike an appropriate balance" between the needs of borrowers and savers, but would pass on the cut in full to business customers./ppThe cuts in mortgage rates were triggered by the announcement from Threadneedle Street that it had cut the bank rate to its joint lowest in history in an attempt to prevent the economy sliding deeper into recession./ppDarling said last night that borrowing costs had come down by a total of three percentage points in two months. "This will help people and businesses - and I want to see these cuts passed on." /ppThe chancellor met bank chiefs yesterday to flesh out plans to offer up to two years' holiday on mortgage payments if homeowners fell into difficulties./ppThe move from the Bank of England was widely expected after a run of poor data from every part of the economy this week suggested Britain was tipping into a longer and deeper recession than the chancellor predicted in last week's pre-budget report./ppBrown welcomed the decision and predicted the cut would not be the last. "They made the right decision. If the banks pass the interest rates on, it's a benefit to homeowners across the country," he said. The prime minister also stepped up the pressure on the bank's monetary policy committee (MPC) to cut rates further in the coming months. "Interest rates could continue to come down. If you've got a period when inflation comes down, you've got to do different things." /ppTUC general secretary Brendan Barber said ministers should get tough with high street banks if they refused to pass on the rate cut. "This decision was spot-on. The Bank of England could not be clearer about what it expects the high street banks to do. The government must now pull every lever of influence to get banks lending. If that doesn't work, radical measures will be needed straightaway. The alternative is a wave of bankruptcy and redundancy."/ppThe Halifax said its decision to cut its SVR from 5% to 4.75% was the result of balancing the interests of customers with "the commercial imperative of managing its business in a sustainable and prudent fashion"./ppFollowing the market mayhem this autumn, the taxpayer now owns almost 60% of RBS and is likely to have a stake of nearly 50% in the country's biggest commercial bank once the merger between Lloyds TSB and Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) is completed. The high street banks believe they are receiving mixed messages from Whitehall, with ministers urging them to both increase their lending and to run their businesses profitably so that they can repay state loans./ph2Rewind to 1951/h2pIt was the year Britain returned Winston Churchill to office aged 77, Newcastle United beat Blackpool in the FA Cup, and free spectacles and false teeth on the NHS were halted. Pendlebury delivered the famous line "It's a good job we're both honest men" in The Lavender Hill Mob - a cinema ticket to see Alec Guinness and Sid James cost 2d, or 21p today, a Morris Minor around pound;520 (pound;12,000). Some goods were still rationed, and a loaf of bread cost 6d. The year was 1951, and it was the last time the Bank's base rate was 2%. It was also the year that Gordon Brown was born.br /strongJo Adetunji/strong/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interestrates"Interest rates/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/bankofenglandgovernor"Bank of England/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/recession"Recession/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oilandgascompanies"Oil and gas companies/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/manufacturing"Manufacturing sector/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/houseprices"House prices/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/economy"Economic policy/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics"Economics/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/PWi05E3YD8FH5vkX9Uo5DOMoCXg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/PWi05E3YD8FH5vkX9Uo5DOMoCXg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/government-legal/" rel="tag"Government/Legal/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/chrysler/" rel="tag"Chrysler, LLC./a/pimg vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/83914407_opt.jpg" alt="" /br /br /During today's Senate hearings of the Detroit 3 automakers, U.S. Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah) spent much of his time on the mic talking about the cost savings that would be realized if General Motors and Chrysler LLC merged. He argued that prior talks held between the two companies has already laid the groundwork for a merger and that estimates peg annual cost savings at $8-10 billion for the combined company. Bennett then remarked that one reason a GM/Chrysler merger didn't happen the first time around was because many people in upper management, possibly including one of the two CEOs sitting before him, would basically lose their jobs. When asked if he would still want government assistance if Congress made the merger of GM and Chrysler a condition, Nardelli responded, "The first job that would go would be mine, but if in fact that's the criteria that means we would get money to save Chrysler and the people who have worked there for 80 some years, I would do it." Wow. br /br /Of course, we're fairly certain Mr. Nardelli has a decently sized nest egg to fall back on, and we'd jump at the offer to make a graceful exit if we were the CEO of Chrysler, too. Nevertheless, Nardelli's comment came off as sincere and was commended by Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) who is chairing the hearings.br /br /[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/nardelli-i-would-sacrifice-my-job-to-save-chrysler/"Nardelli: I would sacrifice my job to save Chrysler/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:30:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/nardelli-i-would-sacrifice-my-job-to-save-chrysler/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1391649/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/nardelli-i-would-sacrifice-my-job-to-save-chrysler/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/xUL4_xLM2nMhB_lFpZYA4XSc6Jo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/xUL4_xLM2nMhB_lFpZYA4XSc6Jo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=uEApW41L"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=uEApW41L" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=7tCMNY77"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=7tCMNY77" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/GKjROE9yMzY" height="1" width="1"/

Petty Enterprises is in discussions to merge its storied franchise with Gillett Evernham Motorsports, The Associated Press has learned.

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=4937d70a14b9b93000d5aaa5maxX=283maxY=110" border="0" alt="yahOL.jpg" title="yahOL.jpg" width="283" height="110" /Yahoo (YHOO) chairman Roy Bostock is suddenly a man in a hurry. Not only does he believe a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/report-yahoos-bostock-wants-a-ceo-by-2009-yhoo"Yahoo will name a new CEO before 2009/a -- about four weeks away -- he's also telling people that a long-discussed AOL-Yahoo merger could be completed as early as next week./p p"Bostock has intimated that Yahoo was ready to do a deal at any time in the next week or so to merge with AOL-with or without a new CEO in place," a href="http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081203/yahoo-board-casts-about-for-new-ceo-no-committee-six-criteria-and-aol-merger-ready/"Kara Swisher reports/a./p pThe final sticking point in the AOL-Yahoo merger is price, of course. Kara reports:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Yahoo has long wanted to give Time Warner about 20 percent of the merged company, while Time Warner has wanted one-third. At current prices, that's about $3 billion in value versus $5 billion./p pThe way Kara characterizes it, the chief negotiator in the AOL (TWX) deal remains Jerry Yang, who will remain on the board and become Chief Yahoo after he steps down from CEO./p pIn other words, don't hold your breath. If Jerry proved anything during his Yahoo tenure -- remember the 100 days of sacred cows, the interminable silences during the Microsoft dance, this very AOL-Yahoo deal -- it's that he's not exactly a cheetah-quick decision-maker./p pstrongSee Also:/stronga href="../../2008/12/report-yahoos-bostock-wants-a-ceo-by-2009-yhoo"br /Report: Yahoo's Bostock Wants A CEO Before 2009 (YHOO)/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/cdvbR3Mf2ZgpktdHbgmMXQa9Ne4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/cdvbR3Mf2ZgpktdHbgmMXQa9Ne4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=SKfhdXdM"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=SKfhdXdM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=GRbebUkS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=NyZZA6Wl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=i38oTMu9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=i38oTMu9" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=EabMIVIm"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=WmsMCQb8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=7hZoPJbf"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=tUJvKzYL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/MSRBmcoVDAE" height="1" width="1"/

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=4937d2c514b9b93000d5a898maxX=150maxY=190" border="0" alt="bostock_roy.jpg" title="bostock_roy.jpg" width="150" height="190" /Yahoo (YHOO) chairman Roy Bostock says the company will have a new CEO before the end of the year, a href="http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081203/yahoo-board-casts-about-for-new-ceo-no-committee-six-criteria-and-aol-merger-ready/"sources tell Kara Swisher/a. Perhaps someone should remind Roy that's only four weeks away and that he better get cracking./p pA good first step, which Kara says hasn't happened yet, would be organizing a search committee to find this company savior. So far it's just Roy and fellow board member Gary Wilson going over names that headhunter firm Heidrick Struggles comes up with./p pKara says Roy and Gary have come up with strongsix criteria for the incoming CEO/strong, however:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"The first is that the candidate have 'extensive' experience as the CEO of a public company. Another calls for media and advertising expertise. And mergers and acquisitions experience. Also strategic skills./p p"Tall order," as Kara notes, and indeed. But have we mentioned we (a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/choose-yahoo-s-new-ceo-final-round-vote-here-"and our polled readers/a) like former DoubleClick CEO and current Google (GOOG) exec David Rosenblatt for the job?/p pBy the criteria, he only fails in that DoubleClick was a private concern when he ran it. But the media and advertising company was the size of a public company, and Rosenblatt wielded plenty of strategic skills turning it around and getting it acquired by Google for $3.1 billion./p pstrongSee Also:/stronga href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/yahoo-ceo-update----rosensweig-conspiracy-editionhell"strongbr //strongYahoo CEO Update: Rosensweig Conspiracy Edition (YHOO)/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/EEYIOiBCeYdsg1Zzmq0zH-igqyw/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/EEYIOiBCeYdsg1Zzmq0zH-igqyw/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=8TTQ20kb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=8TTQ20kb" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=DdNZkXEA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=QzaKre15"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=sXL4ZAe0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=sXL4ZAe0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=WyZ043Ze"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=dZuCsFjG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=IZKb47pa"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=iIUIhVvR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/ss14pyw0Dwc" height="1" width="1"/

The Japanese oil sector may be poised for a flood of defensive mergers after the country’s biggest player, Nippon Oil, announced plans to merge with its smaller rival Nippon Mining in a joint bid to slash costs.

New operations and company mergers aim to increase global competitiveness.

Japan's Nippon Oil is merging with Nippon Mining Holding in an attempt to weather falling oil prices and weak demand.

Japan's Nippon Oil is merging with Nippon Mining Holding in an attempt to weather falling oil prices and weak demand.

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

Japan's top refiner Nippon Oil Corp and sixth-ranked Nippon Mining Holdings said they are considering a merger to create the world's eighth-largest oil major to better compete amid sliding prices and slower demand

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/5737?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+State-controlled+banks+take+over+fund+manager+New+Starch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=New+Star+Asset+Management+Group+%28Business%29%2CBanking+sector+%28Business%29%2CMergers+and+acquisitions+%28business%29%2CBusiness%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29c5=Investments%2CCredit+Crunch%2CBusiness+Marketsc6=Jill+Treanorc7=2008_12_04c8=1128396c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=New+Star+Asset+Managementc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FNew+Star+Asset+Management" width="1" height="1" //divpBanks rescued by the taxpayer have seized New Star, the troubled fund management group which is to delist from the stock exchange after a radical restructuring./ppJohn Duffield, the founder of New Star, is ceding control of up to 95% of the operation to a consortium of banks led by HBOS to relieve its pound;240m debt. /ppDuffield is thought to have been reluctant to agree to the terms of the debt for equity swap which was finally ratified by the New Star board late yesterday afternoon. The fund manager, which took out high profile billboard adverts to attract savers, had been forced to find a way to eradicate the debt to address the concerns of major clients who were reluctant to place their money with the firm./ppDuffield is not expected to remain with the group he founded for much longer after a long City career during which he has developed a reputation as a maverick - albeit a successful one./ppThe complex restructuring is expected to leave banks rescued by the government with control over New Star, which Duffield launched after a high-profile row with the owners of his previous venture, Jupiter. /ppThe combined Lloyds-HBOS bank in which the taxpayer is likely to own about 40%, will have an estimated 45% stake in New Star and RBS - now 58% owned by the taxpayer - with about 15% in the fund management group. HSBC and National Australia Bank will also have stakes./ppYesterday Duffield, 69, was unrepentant about the restructuring which will also hurt his own pocket as he owns around 5% of the company./pp"The cost of this restructuring is regrettably a substantial dilution for ordinary shareholders, including me. However, in current market conditions we have to recognise that there is no option to ensure the stability of the business," Duffield said./pp"We are now free to focus all our attention on improving our investment performance. Our existing share-based bonus scheme will be replaced by a new scheme to ensure that our key people are locked in." /ppTwo new share-based incentive schemes are being put in place for New Star staff, many of whom had been lured to work at the group by the promise of lucrative incentive schemes. Until the credit crunch began to bite, the schemes had proved attractive to employees after its flotation at 225p three years ago. The shares reached 450p before collapsing to just 4p which values the company at barely pound;20m./ppStaff own about 25% of the company and the debt for equity swap will wipe out all existing shareholders who will have to approve the de-listing of the shares. The company took on the debt to return pound;363m to shareholders last year before the credit crunch began./ppDuffield has taken out a total of pound;150m from the company which had been forced to renegotiate the terms of the loan last month amid client withdrawals. Funds under management are now pound;13.9bn from a peak of pound;20bn./ppNew Star had already embarked upon a cost cutting exercise and is losing 60 jobs from its workforce of 380. More posts may now be shed as the banks exert their influence. Directors such as the chief executive Howard Covington may also decide to step aside. The anxiety about the company's debt was heightened after the market mayhem caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Its customers' nerves were further frayed by the suspension of dealing in its high-profile international property fund. The board also blamed its stock market listing for its plight./pp"The board believes that the reporting requirements and public scrutiny that are part of being a listed company have served to magnify these concerns," New Star said./ppThe restructuring involves the banks converting pound;240m of the pound;260m they are owed into pound;94m of preference shares and enough ordinary shares to allow them to own 75% of New Star. The preference shares pay an annual interest and convert into ordinary shares that could ultimately allow the banks to own 95% of the company. While returns for investors in its funds will be affected by the financial turmoil, all investors' money is held in separate trusts and therefore ring-fenced from the fund manager's operations./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/newstarassetmanagementgroup"New Star Asset Management/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/banking"UK banking sector/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/mergersandacquisitions"Mergers and acquisitions/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/RHXG0pP5ERb01w-KlTnCK9ho30w/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/RHXG0pP5ERb01w-KlTnCK9ho30w/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

Commerzbank's investment-banking chief laid out his plans for the integration of Dresdner Kleinwort, including closing the UK mergers and acquisitions business and abolishing trading with the bank's own capital

DesktopLinux: "Clearwire Corp. announced that it has completed a $14.5 billion transaction with Sprint Nextel to combine their Mobile WiMAX broadband se