Arrrrr me bucko!

With all the seriousness surrounding us with a meltdown on the Dow this morning and a hopeless collection of toss pots up for the 2008 election, I just don't feel the need to be serious lately.

With that in mind lets have a look at some attempts at livening up the advertising during the election race. From Radio Live

Pirate pimping your Prime Minister

 

We want a fun election, so if you see any billboards that have been 'bad-touched in a good way', then we want to see them. The best will go on the website, just like the beauty above.

 

During last year's Mayoral Elections, Sideshow Bob Parker won the public vote. Look and see why.

 

  

 

I like the Simpson's related billboard myself, it is the level of mentality of most pollies and lest face it you can probably trust Homer Simpson above Helen Clark any day.

Helen Clark's modified billboard looks more like her than her real one.

c Political Animal 2008

700 Billion bailout fails to pass in lower house

From Share Investor Blog

News just in that the 700 billion bailout has just failed a vote in the House:

The fate of a controversial $700 billion financial bailout plan was in doubt Monday as a House vote turned against it.

The next steps were not immediately clear but supporters were scrambling to put it up for another vote.

What was supposed to be a 15-minute vote stretched past the half-hour mark as leadership scrambled for support. Investors who had been counting on the rescue plan sent the Dow Jones industrial average down as much as 700 points while watching the measure come up short of the necessary support, before rebounding slightly. The key stock reading was down more than 500 points.

The measure needs 218 votes for passage. Democrats voted 141 to 94 in favor of the plan, while Republicans voted 65 to 133 against. That left the measure with 206 votes for and 227 against.

CNN Money

It doesn't mean the rescue package is necessarily over, it will probably go back to the house in a modified way but it does mean that markets are reacting badly and are in a worse position than they would if a rescue package wasn't announced.

This is because if anything else, apart from the actual dire situation the financial sector is in, markets hate uncertainty.

The DOW is down 710 points as a result as at 8.33 am(NZ Time)

I expected a bigger plunge but the market still has 27 minutes of trading before close.

c Share Investor & Political Animal 2008

Winston limbos even lower

From an increasingly paranoid and deluded Winston Peters and his blog comes the following:

One of our supporters sent this in, we thought you might like it!

 

Which of these two spent $20,000 on his teeth?

Infantile, nasty, rude and desperate stuff, just like some of the content on this site or on BarnsleyBill -David Benson Pope, and Assult with a deadly fart- but we are not running for office.

I will have a go at a comparison of my own.

What is the difference between these two men and the way they operate politically?

Answer?

Sadly, very little at all.

c Political Animal 2008

OneSteel makes cheeky bid for minority shareholders

Crikey mate! They are at it again.

Those cheapskate Aussies are trying to steal (pun intended) Steel and Tube [STU.NZX] off shareholders for the measly price of NZ$4 a share.

OneSteel [OST.ASX] has today launched a bid for the 49.73% of Steel and Tube they don't already own.

It has shades of the Contact Energy[CEN.NZX] takeover bid last year about it when Origin Energy attempted to buy the approximately half of Contact they didn't already own, for a knock down bargain basement price and the board of Contact, which had a number of Origin aligned directors on it approved the bid.

It wasn't until an independent report came back that the bid by Origin was seen as the highway robbery it clearly was and Origin was rightly sent packing.

I assume that OneSteel have a number of directors on the Steel and Tube board sympathetic to Origin's charms, so it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that they will probably want to rubber stamp their parent company's bid without so much as a "hold your horses mate" (insert Australian twang here).

Apart from the cheek of the bid, it once again highlights the major gaps in New Zealand's financial regulatory and takeover laws, where a majority holder in a listed company thinks they can dupe the remaining shareholders simply because they have board control and therefore the controlling votes.

Of course this is where Steel and Tube shareholders are crucial in this scenario. If they are dumb enough to sell for 4 bucks well you just cant help some people.

Seriously though, times are tight so investors could be forgiven for folding but the company is worth more than $NZ4(at today's AU/NZ exchange rate cross only AU$3.28 )

Steel and Tube is a cyclical company. Currently the building and construction sector is experiencing a slowdown and raw materials are getting more expensive to buy to make their products. The current credit crunch and market jitters isn't helping either and as a consequence the share price is trading at multi year lows.

This will change, there will be a construction upswing, market turmoil will abate and raw steel is going drop in price.

Guess what, that means profit and the share price will rise.

OneSteel's bid is therefore very opportunistic. I don't blame them, it is a smart move.

But and it is a big but (insert OZ accent again) it is up to shareholders to have some steely resolve and and just say no to those aggressive little buggers across the ditch.

I have been an unwilling participant in a cheapskate takeover before. The Transpacific Industries [TPI.ASX] "merger" of Waste Management NZ a few years back left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

The CEO of Transpacific made what he called a "fair bid' for an almost monopoly company that had been growing profit at 20% per annum for over 5 years and shareholders fell all over themselves to take the cash.

A made a large profit on a large number of shares but I didn't want to sell. Waste Management was going to be a good long term company in my portfolio.

As I am a small shareholder in Steel and Tube, my advice to shareholders is to hang on tight for the independent directors report on the OneSteel bid.

See what they have to say and if they approve tell OneSteel and the directors where to get off.


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c Share Investor 2008