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July 28, 2005

Entertainment buyout?

Filed under: by brother9 at 4:25 pm

The hot rumor today is that NBC Universal, owned by GE, is looking to buyout Dreamworks. This could be worth as much as $1 billion dollars. Dreamworks is not offering a comment, as often happens, and also issued a statement sayign the buyout is “not authorised.”

If it’s not authorised, there’s implications that the talks have been going on in spurts behind the scenes. There could be partial sales.

Or possibly Dreamworks is looking for a sweetheart deal like Disney got with Pixar? In the fight between Dreamworks and Pixar to create animated movies, they have always used two very divergent models. Pixar made fewer, more tightly animated movies, while Dreamworks went for quanitity.

If NBC Universal does buyout Dreamworks, this could also mean more TV programming moves.

July 21, 2005

China’s currency gamble

Filed under: by brother9 at 1:29 pm

Today China dropped its policy of linking the Yuan to the dollar in a fixed exchange rate. For the past ten years the yuan traded at 8.277 to the dollar. As of today the value of the yuan trades at 8.11 yuan, which is still a state-set value but is moving towards a more market-based value based on a series of values in relation to the larger European currencies.

Many people - US lawmakers included - have been pressuring China for years to remove the fixed status of the yuan and have it float on the currency market. It’s been claimed that the Chinese government has undervalued the yuan as much as 40 percent giving Chinese exporters unfair advantages based on conversion.

The dollar is down against the Japanese yen - the bellwether of the Asian economy - on the news.