Wednesday, May 11, 2016; Office Depot - Staples Keystoned By Judge; One Of The Two Now On Glide Path To Bankruptcy

Updates

May 12, 2016: the WSJ sees through the keystoning of the Staple-Office Depot merger. LOL. It was to help the big firms, like Amazon, Walmart. This is the "news" story.

Eventually, the judge sided with FTC lawyers who argued that combining the two biggest U.S. office suppliers could hurt large businesses. The companies had counted on the deal to help them cut costs in the face of shrinking demand for office supplies and competition from online players.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has a reputation for thinking out loud in court, and many of his early thoughts from the bench didn't sound promising for the FTC. He openly questioned key parts of the government’s case, and an FTC lawyer at times stumbled in answering his questions.

Also this: Staples is in deep doo-doo: 

Staples Inc. executives gambled they could navigate a tough retail market by gobbling up their closest rival. Now that the bet has backfired, the office-supply chain must shrink to survive.

Shares of Staples and Office Depot Inc. tumbled Wednesday after a federal judge ruled against a combination that would have created a company with $36 billion in annual revenue and 3,600 stores. The judge sided with Federal Trade Commission lawyers who argued that combining the two biggest U.S. office suppliers could hurt large businesses.

The companies now must fend for themselves in a market that has become even less forgiving than it was 15 months ago, when the chains originally proposed joining forces, analysts say. Both companies had counted on the deal to help them slash as much as $1 billion in costs to combat shrinking demand for office supplies and fresh competition from online players like Amazon.com Inc.

Now the op-ed: protecting big business. 

Stuck in a declining market, Staples and Office Depot have been reporting reduced sales. Government lawyers might have noticed that people are using less paper and ink these days. Then there are those little competitors called Amazon, Costco and Wal-Mart. Such competition is why the government couldn’t argue with a straight face that a merged company would force higher prices on individual consumers or small businesses. So the government claimed that the victims of the proposed merger would be huge corporations that buy in bulk.

Amazon’s unit selling to this market is already a billion-dollar business, but the feds asked the court to believe there would be little competition for large corporate accounts. As if Amazon and others couldn’t react to new opportunities if the combined firm started mistreating corporate giants.

The FTC argument was so weak in court that the companies rested their case without offering a defense. Yet federal Judge Emmet Sullivan decided to approve the government’s request for a preliminary injunction to stop the merger, which has killed the deal and sent the stock prices of both companies plunging.

Original Post

 
Active rigs:

	5/11/2016	05/11/2015	05/11/2014	05/11/2013	05/11/2012
Active Rigs	28	85	192	185	209

RBN Energy: Whatever Happened to Condensates after Lifting of the Crude Export Ban?

CNBC asks an interesting question, providing a great discussion on "type" of oil -- I don't care for the phrase "quality of oil." For the umpteenth time, all I will say is that the oil companies had this figured out twenty years ago and then President Obama came along and killed the Keystone. Kompletely unexpected. The timing was such it probably had no impact on the Bakken boom but had the Keystone come on-line ten years earlier, it's very possible the Bakken boom would not have happened.

With regard to US oil independence, two comments:

• the question is moot; and, 
• the question changed slightly years ago, from American (US) independence to North American independence 

Job watch: last week the Labor Department reported one of the worst job reports ever, and in the process, catching "everyone" off balance. I said at the time folks would be working "overtime" to massage the numbers and find the right spin to explain this. I was surprised that nothing was reported. It turns out it just took longer than expected to find the spin. But today "they" have explained it. LOL. Yahoo!Finance is reporting that the number of minimum wage workers has actually decreased. Well, that's good. We got that figured out. Last week's horrendous jobs report? Never mind. [Yes, I know this article on "minimum wage" had nothing to do with the jobs report. Just filling time until the day starts.]

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Loose Ends

Bloomberg reports that "Big Oil" abandons $2.5 billion in US Arctic drilling rights. Shell, COP, others have quietly "relinquished" claims. The Arctic is estimated to hold 27 billion bbls of oil (less than the Bakken) and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. From an earlier post, to put these things into perspective:

The size of the Utica shale play’s technically recoverable resources is larger than previously thought, a recent study by West Virginia University (WVU) has found. WVU found that the Utica play contains technically recoverable resources of 782 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas and around 1.9 billion barrels of oil. That’s higher than the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) 2012 estimate of technically recoverable resources at 38 Tcf of gas and 940 million barrels of oil.

What a mess. WSJ reports that ETE wants to restructure or escape a $33 billion agreement to acquire WMB.

WSJ also reports that Macy's slashes forecasts as sales slump accelerates. Like many retailers, the Cincinnati-based department-store chain has been struggling with declining sales, hurt by dwindling store traffic, competition from discount retailers and cautious consumer spending. The company said earlier this year that challenges would persist during the first quarter, but the sales decline was much steeper than analysts expected.

No link but reported everywhere: Staples-Office Depot merger scrapped after judge says "no." Apparently, despite the fact that Amazon and Walmart are dominant, the judge was concerned that SOD would be a monopoly. Wow.

WSJ also has a story on "new" jobs being created in the Obama economy. A lot of data but doesn't add a whole lot to the discussion. Except discussion.