Business Insight Zone

Bullet points to catch up on some interesting things I’ve seen this week:

• No one seems to know just how well the economy is doing. Good? Good, but with important caveats? Better than it looks? Worse than it looks? Good, until you consider bond yields? Bad, if you ignore consumer spending? It’s a mystery, but with the stock markets seemingly exploring new highs from week to week, it’s a mystery with a lot of risk — or reward — attached to it.
• Crude oil prices finished yesterday above $69 per barrel, the highest price in nine months, but then they lost $1.50 earlier today thanks to a new U.S. government inventory report. This continues the bumpy (if high-altitude) ride that crude has been on. A key factor in the continued high prices, and their volatility: the labor strike in Nigeria.
• Airbus is having a better week than I would have suspected last week.
• Maybe it’s a sign of my age, but it seems like just yesterday that Terry Semel rode into Yahoo! from Hollywood on a white horse. Although he remains the online giant’s chairman, the fairy tale is over. Company co-founder Jerry Yang has taken over the reins as CEO, and Robert Scoble has some thoughts on why Yahoo! president Sue Decker didn’t get the job. Can Yang turn Yahoo! around? Fortune magazine’s Adam Lashinsky isn’t so sure.
• We have an early winner in the category of “Business Deal of the Week That Has a Random Connection to the Life of This Blog’s Host”: The Finish Line has agreed to pay $1.5 billion for Nashville-based Genesco . . . where my father worked as an engineer when I was born. By pure coincidence, I’m wearing a pair of Genesco-made Johnston & Murphy shoes as I write this. (Too bad they don’t have me doing endorsements for them . . .)
• It’s been a little less than six months since Bob Nardelli’s career train left The Home Depot, but already the company is dismantling one of his prize creations, HD Supply. The idea was that the parent company could reap bigger rewards by supplying consumer do-it-yourselfers at retail (via Home Depot stores) and construction contractors at wholesale (via HD Supply). Now it will be up to HD Supply’s new owners — Bain Capital, The Carlyle Group, and Clayton, Dubilier, & Rice — to reap the benefits from HD Supply.

And finally . . .

• To finish on a frivolous note: on Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran this story, “Bollywood Issues Casting Call in London” (subscription required). It’s a typically well-reported WSJ piece, giving context on the financial growth of the movie business in India. But the picture that ran with the story in the print version of the paper bore a caption that began, “Aishwarya Rai, an Indian film actress, . . .” Given the massive popularity of Ms. Rai, the 1994 Miss World winner who has often been called the most beautiful woman in the world, calling her “an Indian film actress” is a bit like calling Pelé “a Brazilian soccer player.”

Category: Deals, Energy, Media