It’s here!
A weak dollar just makes the $1 billion Bear Stearns Investment from Citic a steal. The sound bites from James Cayne (last bank to the party) are a joke (stick with Goldman as I have always said). The big money to be made off this news is to sell your business now while the getting is good. Foreigners have a history of paying top dollar for US assets only to give them back a few years later.
That all said, this time may be different (China is not Russia, Japan, or France).
First, they are buying into Bear Stearns down 30 plus percent from all-time highs. They are buying it with US dollars that cost them a nickel a piece.
Basically they got this piece of Bear Stearns for squat.
Interesting times indeed and a great time to be a bull. Tons’s of bears, no IPO’s, a weak dollar giving us a bazillion mergers, and US companies with foreign exposure are getting a huge competitive advantage, whether they deserve it or not.
Since the Chinese yuan is pegged to the dollar, they aren’t getting any currency benefits. Instead the benefit is their “bubble” valuaton of Citic which by traditional measures is almost 5 times more expensive than US investment banks, according S&P500.
Add to the fact that this is an exchange where Bear has to take a 2% stake in Citic for $1 billion, it comes to down the simple fact that BSC is overpaying for Citic’s 2% and Citic is slightly underpaying for BSC’s 6%.
And that makes Bear looks like a bigger fool.
http://lcmarket.blogspot.com/2007/10/citic-invests-1-billion-in-bear-stearns.html