IS Robert Champion de Crespigny a better poker player than Hugh Morgan? Shareholders in Normandy Mining have sat back and watched the stock soar from $1.25 to $2 as the patrician in Adelaide extracted a top-dollar takeover tab from Newmont Mining.
ANY remaining doubts that the Australian stock market is awash with cash were removed recently when Westfield shopping mall mogul Frank Lowy lifted $1.1 billion from institutional wallets in a matter of hours for expansion in America.
REMEMBER those airboards zipping around the Olympic arena during the opening ceremony? Like many of Australia’s great inventions, they were created in the industrial suburbs of Perth.
THE star attraction for visitors being shown around the cavernous Oceanfast boat shed out at Henderson is the three quarters completed 69.5-metre yacht Aussie Rules being built for golfer/businessman Greg Norman.
IF the world changed on September 11, it seems a trifle too early for it to have changed back again. That is why investors will have to be especially careful in 2002, which is the year of the horse in the Chinese calendar.
ENRON Corp hails from Houston, Texas. It would be appropriate for the group to boast the biggest bankruptcy in corporate history, with debts of more than $US20 billion.
DID you enjoy your last trip to Singapore? No doubt you stayed at the Marco Polo and sipped gin slings with tiffin in Raffles dining room. Soon you will be able to buy a piece of the Lion Republic by simply picking up the phone.
THE 26,000 shareholders in local technology chip ERG received their prospectuses this week for the $104 million renounceable rights issue to help pay for the acquisition of Brussels-based Proton World International (PWI).
THANKFULLY we are on the last lap of what passes for an election campaign in Australia. It would be a good idea if politicians were made to take something akin to the Hippocratic oath.
WE cannot be certain that Qantas chief pilot Geoff Dixon and QBE boss Frank O’Halloran have Business News specially couriered to their Sydney headquarters, but we might be forgiven for whimsically supposing they read our column of October 11.
WHAT on earth is going on in New Zealand? The Foodland supermarkets group nurtures the modest ambition of buying the 83-store Woolworths NZ concern from Dairy Farm in Hong Kong, whose Australasian business plan has curdled.
ONE of the reasons the Australian stock market has been defying gravity of late is the abrupt halt to the billions of dollars worth of share placements being made by companies to institutional investors.
THE problem about losing money in the stock market is deciding who to blame for it. The candidates might include your wife, dumb financial writers, or that man in the pub. In very extreme circumstances, it might even be you.
AUSTRALIA is well placed geographically, economically and financially to withstand the shocks now rocking the world. Yet the reputation of our stock market as a safe haven is being sullied.
THE world’s financial capital of Manhattan has been devastated, with the brightest and the bravest among the slain. It remains to be seen how deep a wound the terrorists have inflicted on the US economy and how long it will take to heal.
