This Christmas season, think about distributing some of your income to local businesses. The 3/50 Project is a concept that I like very much and I think is easy for people to get a handle on and get behind. It goes like this: What three independently owned businesses would you miss if they disappeared?...
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Back from a work and Thanksgiving-induced hiatus. Pretty slow couple of weeks for large firms with a local presence. India’s Reliance Industries has tendered a non-binding offer for LyondellBasell. Details were not disclosed but sources cited by CBS News Marketwatch say it is in the neighborhood of $12 billion. Rumors has been circulating that...
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In business sector, India’s largest company, Reliant Industries continues its interest in acquiring the North American assets of LyondellBasell. The petrochemical giant floundered into debt-induced Chapter 11 bankruptcy last January. Although no public pronnouncement has been made wth regardst to the size of the offer, industry sources say it probably ranges between $3 and...
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Back in August, we covered an unexpected outbreak of honesty from the International Energy Agency regarding global oil supplies. At that time, we had the IEA Chief Economist admitting for the first time that most of the world’s largest oil fields were at or near peak production. This week more IEA people are going...
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CNN Small Business has Des Moines as the Number 8 mid-sized city in America to launch a small business. Dubuque, Waterloo and Ames are ranked eight, seventeen and eighteen among smaller cites. Four cities in the top 50. That is eight percent of the total. Considering that Iowa is the 30th largest state, I’d...
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Yesterday I posted a rant on Aww Martha on the Clinton Herald’s lack of decent news coverage of local major businesses. There really is no excuse because setting up Google News alerts is so simple. So, I did just that for some of the local major businesses. I set it for weekly digests. Instant...
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Lyondell Chemical was purchased by Netherlands-based firm Basell (owned by a Russian oligarch) in July 2007. The new firm, LyondellBasel, burdened by the $12.7 billion leveraged buyout, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January of 2009. LyondellBasell said yesterday that one of its European holding companies had also filed for bankruptcy protection and...
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Back in May when I expressed the pipe-dream goal of letting Chrysler and GM die I said that there was a new American auto industry waiting to grow fertilized by the corpse of the old. Well, our Socialist overlords have apparently taken this to heart and have loaned Fisker $528M to help finance the...
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From the UK’s Daily Mail: Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers...
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From the San Diego Union Tribune, the hometown paper Bridgepoint Edcucation (Ticker: BPI), the parent company of Ashford University comes the following story from Saturday, September 5: San Diego-based Bridgepoint Education, the for-profit operator of online college programs and two universities, was among Wall Street’s top losers yesterday after it announced that it might...
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