Hawaii lawmakers are considering renaming the soon-to-open Kapolei Court Complex after Chief Justice Ronald Moon.
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 38 was introduced by Senate President Colleen Hanabusa and Sen. Brian Taniguchi, chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Government Operations Committee. Both are Democrats.
It proposes renaming the new $124.5 million Kapolei Court Complex the “Ronald T.Y. Moon Judicial Complex.”
Moon spearheaded development of the West Oahu court complex, which will open March 29 after more than 20 years of planning and nearly three years under construction. It will serve as the new home of family court for the 1st Judicial Circuit.
Under state law, Moon must retire as chief justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court when he turns 70 this September, capping a more than 40-year legal career in Hawaii. He was named to the state’s highest court in 1993.
The resolution is nonbinding but serves as a recommendation, in this case, to the governor, the state comptroller and the administrative director of the state’s courts.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will have a public hearing on the resolution at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday at the State Capitol.
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Dubai is reportedly preparing to sell a host of assets, including one of the world’s best known cruise ships, as the emirate’s investment arm looks to restructure a mountain of debt.
The Queen Elizabeth II, or QE2, is rumored to be one of the assets that Dubai’s state-run private equity firm, Istithmar World, is planning to sell. An Istithmar spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
However, a company spokesman told Arabian Business that "there are a number of options being considered for QE2. IW is considering which option will best maximise value of the vessel."
Istithmar bought the QE2, once the largest passenger ship in existence, in 2007 for an estimated $100 million. The firm had planned to turn the ship into a floating hotel attached to a man-made, palm-shaped island in the Persian Gulf.
Also in the firm’s portfolio is a 20% stake in Canadian circus group Cirque du Soleil. But a Cirque du Soleil spokeswoman said the group has had no indication from Istithmar that a sale is pending.
Any proceeds from the asset sales would probably be used to pay down the $22 billion in debts that Dubai World, the parent company of Istithmar, took on during a multiyear, global property binge.
Dubai was one of the first sovereign nations to run into serious debt problems as a result of the global economic downturn payday loan lenders. The fallout has now spread to Europe, where Greece and other countries are struggling to slash budget deficits and repay mountains of debt.
Dubai World, the investment arm of Dubai, rattled financial markets late last year when it signaled that it couldn’t make payments on its debts. The company received a $10 billion bailout in November from fellow emirate Abu Dhabi and is working with creditors to restructure its debt load.
As a result, Istithmar has already been forced to sell some assets at a loss. In December, the firm sold the W Hotel in New York for only $2 million in a foreclosure auction. It reportedly paid more than $200 million for the boutique hotel in 2006.
Last week, Istithmar sold its stake in Indian budget airline SpiceJet for $37 million. It also recently announced plans to sell port and shipping agent Inchcape Shipping Services for $700 million.
Despite the recent asset sales, Istithmar still has a large portfolio of investments and properties, including a large stake in book publishing giants Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt Education. It also has interests in U.K.-based Pension Insurance Corporation Holdings and Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York-based investment firm.
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The Obama White House likes to say that the theories of John Maynard Keynes form the foundation for its fiscal policies. Most notably, it draws upon the legendary British economist’s idea of spending big to pull out of a recession.
But one economist says the administration has gotten Keynes only half right. Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon is one of the most influential monetarists of the past 50 years. He has served in the Department of the Treasury under President Kennedy and on the Council of Economic Advisors during the Reagan Administration. He also authored the book, Keynes’s Monetary Theory: A Different Interpretation.
While the Obama team is laying out huge sums of money, Meltzer says it’s neglecting a key part of Keynes’ plan: You can’t run up a debt without a way to cover it.
Meltzer recently sat down with Fortune editor-at-large Shawn Tully. Below are edited excerpts from their conversation.
If Keynes were alive today, what would he think of President Obama’s fiscal policies?
He would roll over in his grave if he could see the things being done in his name. Keynes was opposed to large structural deficits. He thought that they chilled rather than stimulated the economy. It’s true that we’re stuck with large deficits now. The goal should be to reduce them, not to take on new spending that makes them worse.
Today, deficits are getting bigger and bigger with no plan to significantly lower them. Keynes understood what the current administration doesn’t understand that the proper policy in a democracy recognizes that today’s increase in debt must be paid in the future.
We paid down wartime deficits. Now we have continuous deficits. We used to have a rule people believed in, balanced budgets. And now that’s gone.
Didn’t Keynes advocate temporary deficit spending in a recession?
Keynes wanted deficits to be cyclical and temporary. He wouldn’t have been in favor of efforts to raise tax rates in a recession to eliminate deficits. He viewed that as suicidal. He was opposed to the idea that governments should balance the budget during a downturn, and advocated running short-term deficits to spur the economy.
The type of stimulus he advocated was very specific. He said it should be geared towards increasing private investment. He viewed private investment, as opposed to big government spending, as the source of durable job creation. He also said that the deficits should be self-liquidating, so that the increased economic activity caused by the stimulus inevitably generated a combination of extra tax revenues and lower unemployment payments. With higher revenues and lower outlays, the deficit would disappear.
The Obama administration’s main objective, in the name of Keynes, is boosting consumption. That sounds very different from the focus on investment that you say Keynes advocated.
Keynes didn’t favor at any time that I know spending to increase consumption. He didn’t want that, and in fact he believed that was taken care of by the marketplace.
Keynes wanted to increase employment by smoothing the amount of investment through the up and down parts of the business cycle. He knew that recessions cause a decline in investment, and that the fall in investment caused unemployment to rise. So he wanted the government to stabilize investment through a recession.
What specific policies did Keynes advocate for smoothing investment?
Keynes is very vague on the subject. He believed that the government should plan and direct investment, but not nationalize it. He talked about how well utilities were run under state regulation in Britain. Keynes wanted to apply that model to more of the economy. He thought government planning of investment was the best way to reduce risk for private companies and lower interest rates to spur investment.
Did Keynes champion tax cuts or government spending increases in a recession?
Again, he was extremely vague. On spending, he did say that deficits should be temporary and self-liquidating. He clearly did not advocate long-term spending in excess of revenues, since that causes structural deficits. Nor did he specifically recommend tax reductions for individuals or companies. Those types of cuts, however, are an obvious way to achieve his goal of boosting investment in a recession. And it’s been used with great success by his Keynesian disciples. For example, the Kennedy Administration tax cuts were championed by Keynesian economists, and proved very successful at raising investment.
And one of the leading Keynesians, Franco Modigliani, developed a theory of consumption stating that temporary tax cuts are mainly saved or used to reduce debt. Milton Friedman, the ultimate champion of free markets, independently developed an alternative model that came to the same conclusion. The temporary reductions under Carter, George W. Bush and Obama were all failures, since people spend more only when they’re confident their take home pay will rise permanently.
This is standard economic theory that the current administration ignores.
What would Keynes think of Obama’s stimulus plan?
It’s unbelievable that a man whose main theme was to smooth investment comes to be the proponent of redistributing income away from the people and companies who do the investing.
My advice on the stimulus plan was, don’t do it. Let’s look at the plan. First, a lot of the money was used to reduce the deficits of state and local governments by increasing the federal debt. It was simply money transferred from the federal government. The economic multiplier effect was zero. Second, the temporary tax cuts went to paying off credit cards and other debts, not spending that would have increased economic growth.
Nike Inc. built its $648 million golf business on the back of Tiger Woods.
Now it appears the Washington County athletic footwear and apparel giant (NYSE: NKE) will try to sell some golf clubs without him.
The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported that Nike will launch the Victory Red STR8-FIT Tour fairway woods on Jan. 28 that were designed with the help of 13 U.S. golf stars that promote the Nike Golf brand. The new line’s promotional materials, however, make no mention of Woods, the newspaper reported.
The new clubs were tested during a tournament by Lucas Glover, who won the U.S. Open championship last year, according to the report.
General Motors, AT&T Corp., Accenture, Gillette and Swiss watch maker Tag Heuer have all ended their relationships with Woods since a Thanksgiving weekend car crash and later admission to marital infidelity.
Nike, however, has stood by his side.
In an interview last month with the Sports Business Journal, Chairman Phil Knight referred to the Woods scandal as a “minor blip.”
It’s unclear whether the latest product release is an indication that the company’s support for Woods — who has since taken a leave of absence from golf — is wavering.
A Nike spokeswoman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
More than 30 leading budget experts on Monday prescribed a course for deficit reduction that the nation needs to take if it wants to "buy some breathing room" to avoid a debt crisis.
In its report "Red Ink Rising," the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform called on Congress and the White House to commit to stabilizing the public debt to 60% of gross domestic product by 2018. Left unchecked, it’s on track to hit 85% by 2018, and then grow to 100% four years after that. By 2038, it could reach 200%.
To put those numbers in context, just before the economic crisis, public debt stood at 41% of GDP. The public debt — $7.72 trillion as of Dec. 11 - represents the money the United States owes its creditors. It does not include the $4.36 trillion the federal government owes itself because of all the revenue the Treasury has borrowed from federal programs such as Social Security and Medicare over the years.
The concern is that well before the public debt reaches 200% of GDP, fear of inflation — and its twin nemesis, a decline in the dollar — could cause investors to demand a higher return in exchange for buying U.S. Treasurys. And higher rates would make the U.S. debt load that much more onerous because the government is constantly refinancing the debt it already has on the books at whatever the going interest rates are.
To stabilize the debt at 60% of GDP, the commission recommends policymakers negotiate a package of measures in 2010 that would begin to phase in by 2012, assuming the economy has recovered.
"To buy some breathing room, the United States must show its creditors that it is serious about stabilizing the federal debt over a reasonable timeframe. Both spending cuts and tax increases will be necessary," the commission wrote.
The mere act of signaling to creditors that a deficit-reduction plan is in place may have a positive economic effect, the group asserted.
"Improving [creditors’] expectations can lower investor perceptions of risk and thus the premiums that creditors demand for interest rates paid on U.S. assets," the report said.
In order for the plan to be perceived as credible, however, the commission believes there should be an automatic trigger to set in motion spending cuts and tax increases if a debt target set by lawmakers is missed in any given year instant payday loans.
"The goal of an enforcement mechanism is to be punitive enough to cause lawmakers to act but realistic enough that it can be enacted if necessary as a last resort," the commission wrote.
The commission’s members are a bipartisan collection of former directors of the Congressional Budget Office, the White House Office of Management and Budget, as well as former chairmen of the Senate and House Budget Committees and former U.S. Comptrollers General, among others.
Their estimates and suggestions are based on the assumptions that a number of current policies will remain in place. Among the assumptions are that the majority of the Bush-era tax cuts will be extended, that the reach of the alternative minimum tax will be reduced so as not to ensnare middle-income families, and that normal discretionary government spending will grow at the same rate as the economy, rather than inflation.
Easier said than done
The commission acknowledges that reducing U.S. debt levels will be neither quick or easy.
And their suggestions are certain to meet resistance from any number of quarters, including from those who fear Social Security and Medicare benefits will be cut drastically.
The growth in the spending for both of those entitlement programs and for Medicaid are growing faster than the GDP. Deficit hawks say permanent changes need to be made to ensure long-term solvency for the programs and fiscal stability for the federal budget.
"That does not mean, however, that the entire solution has to come from changes to [programs such as Medicare and Social Security] — or spending in general," the commission said. "To the contrary, government health and retirement programs will almost certainly have to grow as a share of the economy because of demographic and technological factors."
The bottom line is the commission believes changes to the entitlement programs are necessary but not sufficient. "We believe the problem is so large that nearly all areas of the budget will be affected," the report said.
China, South Korea and other emerging economies in East Asia may grow at the fastest pace in three years in 2010 as the global recovery spurs demand for the region’s goods, a division of the Asian Development Bank said.
China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and 10 Southeast Asia economies may expand 6.8 percent in 2010 from 4.2 percent this year, according to a report released today by the ADB’s Office for Regional Economic Integration in Manila.
Asia is leading the world’s emergence from its deepest recession since the 1930s after governments boosted spending, cut taxes and slashed interest rates, averting a spiral into another Great Depression. Growth could falter as the effect of stimulus measures fade and governments exit expansionary policies, the ADB division said.
“With the global recovery tentative, monetary policy should remain accommodative where feasible, with a watchful eye on inflation and asset prices,” the division said. “The recovery could falter if policy makers tighten too early, but tightening too late may lead to higher inflation and unsustainable fiscal deficits in the coming years.”
Confidence in the world economy dipped last month as central banks’ actions to withdraw some emergency measures sparked concern about the strength of the recovery, a Bloomberg survey of users on six continents showed.
Policy makers in Asia have started raising borrowing costs to contain accelerating inflation. The Reserve Bank of Australia increased borrowing costs a total of 75 basis points at its last three meetings and Vietnam raised its benchmark rate by one percentage point to 8 percent in November saving account pay day loan.
Subdued Inflation
“Inflationary pressures appear to be well under control for the moment,” the ADB’s regional integration office said. “While recently showing slight increases, inflation is still expected to remain subdued as economies operate with excess capacity.”
Recovery in East Asia also hinges on the revival of growth in Europe and in the U.S., as this will affect the region’s export-dependent economies, the office said.
“The deleveraging cycle is still in its early years, and if households in developed countries, particularly the U.S., save more-than-expected to repair their balance sheets, then weaker consumer demand will delay recovery in these economies,” the ADB division said.
Emerging East Asia groups China, the Southeast Asian nations of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, and the newly industrialized economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
Developing Asia, which includes economies such as India and Pakistan and excludes Japan, will probably expand 6.6 percent next year after growing 4.5 percent in 2009, the ADB said in a separate note today.
Because oil prices have always been directly related to the strength of the economy, a recovery might have seen headlines like these:
• The recession ends: Get ready for $100 oil
• The economy roars: $140 oil, is there an end in sight?
• Everyone in China buys a Cadillac: World tapped out
But a growing number of experts are saying that you can forget all that. For the next couple of years, they say, oil prices will remain well below $100 a barrel as the economy remains fragile and efficiency measures kick in.
"The world will never run out of oil," Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a recent research note, echoing the old logic that the Stone Age didn’t end because the world ran out of stone. "If the oil age does end, it likely will be because we become more efficient and simply use less petroleum."
It’s this "becoming more efficient" idea that the Deutsche Bank analysts use to predict even lower oil prices in 2010 than now - an average of $65 a barrel next year compared to nearly $80 currently.
To get there, they employ a metric known as energy intensity, which basically measures the amount of oil used in relation to the size of the economy. (Keep an eye on this term in the next couple of weeks - countries at the upcoming Copenhagen summit on climate change will use it to try to wiggle out of making any hard commitments on cutting greenhouse gases.)
The energy intensity of the U.S. economy has actually dropped by about 2% a year every year since the early 1980s. In the next couple of years Deutsche Bank expects it to decline by around 3% as people buy more fuel efficient cars and respond in other ways to the high prices of 2004-2008 and as government conservation measures kick in.
With economic growth expected to remain at a sluggish 2.5% or so over the next couple of years, that translates into an actual drop in U.S. oil consumption.
"US oil demand may have already peaked," the note said.
The bank’s numbers aren’t far off from what the government is saying either no fax payday loans.
U.S. oil consumption, which peaked at almost 21 million barrels a day in 2005, is now under 19 million barrels a day, according to the Energy Information Administration.
"The last time we had a decline in consumption of this magnitude was 1979-82," said Tancred Lidderdale, an oil analyst at EIA. U.S. oil demand isn’t expected to near 21 million barrels a day again until 2029.
The rest of the world
But what about Chinese demand? Speculators? Geopolitical tensions? Or any one of the myriad reasons cited for rising oil prices?
Chinese economic growth at this quick rate is not sustainable, said Addison Armstrong, director of market research at Tradition Energy, an energy brokerage in Stamford, Conn. Besides, he says, the Chinese will likely reduce the energy intensity of their economy even faster than America.
And by the time hundreds of million of Chinese are buying cars, the fleet could very well be all-electric.
As for speculators, Armstrong said credit tightening is making it harder for them to make the big bets on energy that were seen before the crisis.
And geopolitical flare-ups in oil-rich nations are much less apt to affect prices now that the world has the ability to produce much more oil than it is using. Indeed, this lack of spare capacity was an underlying reason oil prices got so high in 2008. That year, spare capacity hit a low of 1 million barrels a day, a mere tanker load away from demand exceeding supply.
Now that number is almost 4 million barrels a day, and expected to grow to 4.5 million barrels a day by the middle of next year.
"There’s so much spare capacity right now," said Armstrong, noting that oil prices in the $70 range are still high enough to insure new supplies are being brought online. "It’s very difficult to see prices much higher."
Gold rose to record highs above $1,150 an ounce on Wednesday as the dollar index languished, boosting interest in the metal as an alternative asset, after largely benign U.S. inflation data.
The metal remains firmly underpinned by technical support after several days of gains, and is likely to break through to further fresh highs in coming sessions after a build-up of momentum, analysts said.
Spot gold hit a high of $1,150.20 an ounce and was at $1,148.50 an ounce at 1431 GMT, against $1,141.50 late in New York on Tuesday.
U.S. gold futures for December delivery on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange also hit a record $1,151.00 and were later up $9.20 at $1,148.60 an ounce.
“This is a sentiment-driven market, which means that should data confirm expectations, the market trades on it, otherwise it ignores it,” said Commerzbank analyst Eugen Weinberg.
“The liquidity is still there, risk appetite is still there, the dollar is weak, so all the factors which have been in place for weeks and months are still in place.”
The metal is attracting a new wave of investment as it pushes through key technical resistance levels to fresh highs.
“(Gold’s) momentum is not down to any particular reason, it is just due to the extraordinary gains seen recently,” said Weinberg. “It is attracting new speculative capital emergency cash loans.”
The euro rose to a session high against the dollar on Wednesday on benign U.S. inflation data, while the dollar index, which measures the U.S. currency’s performance against a basket of six others, was still down 0.52 percent.
Other commodities also climbed, with oil rising back toward $80 a barrel and copper to 13-1/3 month highs near $7,000 a ton. Both have been lifted by the weak dollar.
NON-DOLLAR GOLD CLIMBS
Gold rose in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, reaching its highest since late February in euro and sterling terms, and since May when priced in the Australian dollar.
The physical market was quiet, however, with India’s gold demand abating as prices struck fresh record highs after offtake picked up slightly in the previous two sessions, while scrap flow eased on hopes for higher prices.
The world’s largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, SPDR Gold Trust, said its holdings stood at 1,113.833 tons as of November 17, unchanged from the previous business day.
Gold’s strength also lifted other precious metals, with silver hitting a 16-month high at $18.83 an ounce, platinum reaching a peak of $1,463.50, its highest since September 2008, and palladium reaching a 15-month high of $376.
At the new GM, the buck now stops with the board.
The surprise decision by General Motors Co to drop a plan supported by Chief Executive Fritz Henderson to sell the company’s Opel unit has raised new questions about the standing of the veteran GM insider after just six months on the job.
“It isn’t clear who is running GM,” said Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. “They’ve got a problem here.”
Henderson, who joined GM in 1984 and worked his way up as a financial manager, has only been in charge of GM since this spring, when the Obama administration ousted Rick Wagoner and ordered the company to appoint outsiders to its hitherto insider-dominated board.
The reversal on selling Opel to a group led by Canada’s Magna International Inc suggests to some the new directors — including Ed Whitacre, the former AT&T Inc CEO who now serves as GM’s chairman — are not deferring to anyone. Noteven Henderson, who expressed confidence recently the Opel sale would be wrapped up soon.
The sale was controversial from the start.
“My view was always if at the end of this Opel ended up outside GM, that was a strategic mistake,” Mike Jackson, the head of Auto Nation, told the Reuters Auto Summit in Detroit.
John Smith, a GM group vice president and chief negotiator in the Opel restructuring, told reporters on Wednesday that the decision not to sell Opel was debated vigorously within GM advanced payday loan.
“This has been a close call from the very first of the three detailed reviews with our board,” Smith said. “It was a coin toss in August, it was a coin toss in September and a coin toss of a kind in November.”
HENDERSON HAD FAVORED
Henderson, who vowed to shake up the slow-moving culture of the 101-year-old automaker, had argued the Magna deal was the best remaining choice for cash-strapped GM after seven months of painstaking talks with bidders.
He also said in an interview on CNBC in late October that he thought the board supported the move.
So the company’s announcement on Tuesday that the board had decided to abandon the sale left industry watchers wondering whether Henderson was out of the loop — or losing clout.
“What worries me is the indecisiveness,” Ken Lewenza, the head of the Canadian Auto Workers union told the Reuters Auto Summit on Wednesday. “But if at the end of the day it means success for General Motors, it might make sense.”
Henderson was already looking like the odd man out in Detroit, where the other two car companies, Ford and Chrysler, are now run by executives — Alan Mullaly at Ford and Sergio Marchionne at Chrysler — who have spent most of their careers outside the car industry.
General Electric Co. continued to get hammered by its troubled finance arm, but the conglomerate’s widespread cost cutting and a strong showing from its consumer and industrial units helped GE’s profit beat Wall Street’s expectations.
The company said it was starting to turn around its finance unit GE Capital, and began to see signs of stabilization across the board.
"In a global economic environment that is beginning to slowly recover, GE delivered solid third-quarter business results," said Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, on a conference call with investors. "GE is well positioned in this reset economy."
The Fairfield, Conn.-based conglomerate said its third-quarter net income fell 44% to $2.4 billion, or 23 cents per share, for the period ended Sept. 30. Results included a charge of $600 million, or 5 cents per share for restructuring and cost cutting.
Without the charge, GE earned 28 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, who typically exclude one-time items from their estimates, forecasted earnings of 20 cents per share.
Sales fell 20% to $37.8 billion, missing analysts’ forecasts of $39.5 billion.
The company’s infrastructure business has fared very well in the past year despite the deep economic recession. But much of the company has been rocked by the downturn, dragged by losses at finance arm GE Capital and struggling media unit NBC Universal. GE is expected to sell its majority stake in NBC in the coming months, perhaps to cable provider Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500).
"GE’s operating performance has been uneven and its finance portfolio is a source of risk," said Jeffrey Sprague, Citigroup analyst, in a note written after GE reported its earnings. "We believe GE may have reached the point that its size and complexity have become a hindrance to effective management."
Shares of GE (GE, Fortune 500) dropped 70 cents, or 4%, in afternoon trading to $16.09. The stock fell below where it started the year at $16.20 per share, but it is well above its closing point of $6.66 set on March 5, which was an 18-year low.
GE Capital: Revenue from the company’s finance arm fell 30% to $12.2 billion in the quarter, accounting for nearly a third of GE’s overall revenue.
Immelt said the company has made "significant progress to make GE Capital safe and secure," shrinking the company ahead of schedule. He said that winding down had a negative impact on revenue, but serves as "an important part of our strategy."
Many analysts and GE investors have been pushing the company to scale back GE Capital even further and focus it more on vendor financing for corporate customers as opposed to consumer finance and real estate loans.
The unit was profitable in the third quarter, but earned just $263 million, down 87% from a profit of $2 billion during the same period last year. As in the second quarter, every segment of GE Capital was profitable except for the real estate unit, which lost $538 million in the third quarter.
Immelt said the company’s real estate division "is experiencing a tough environment," but said "the risks are well understood and manageable."
"While it remains a tough environment for GE Capital, we are seeing signs of stabilization," Immelt said. "We have successfully navigated through the financial crisis and are preparing GE Capital to be a smaller, more focused franchise."
Other units: Sales dropped in all of the company’s segments last quarter, but cost-cutting initiatives helped keep profits up for the most part.
NBC Universal’s revenue fell 20% in the quarter, but profit rose 13% compared to last year. Sales from the energy infrastructure unit fell 9%, but earnings were up 11%. At the consumer and industrial division, sales fell 18% but profit rose nearly 149%.
Besides GE Capital, only the technology infrastructure unit had falling revenue and profit last quarter. Sales at the division were down 11% and earnings fell 8%.
The company was mum on any possible deals for NBC Universal, saying that it constantly evaluates its diverse portfolio of assets, but doesn’t see an immediate need to sell any of them off.
GE holds an 80% stake in NBC, with French media company Vivendi holding the other 20%. Vivendi is believed to be interested in selling its stake in NBC, and GE said it may look to find a new partnership or allow Vivendi to sell its stake in a public offering.
"There has been a lot of speculation on NBC Universal, but in one way, shape or form, that’s been the case for a long time," said Immelt. "I don’t think we need to do any deals in the future … but we want to be ready for a number of scenarios, including an IPO or a strategic partnership."
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