Top Turkeys of 2008
Fortune’s Allan Sloan gets out of the coop early with his list of turkeys for Thanksgiving. There’s no shortage of candidates. Top of his list: letting Lehman Brothers fail.
Letting Lehman Brothers go into bankruptcy in September is the turkey of the year, if not the decade, for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.
Other prime turkeys:
Yahoo spurns Microsoft: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang gets thecredit for this one, with an honorable mention to Carl Icahn, who bought into Yahoo on the assumption that he could get a deal done with Microsoft. “By our estimate, he’s down more than $1 billion on his $1.8 billion Yahoo investment.”
SuperSIV: Last fall Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced a superfund in which banks would combine to buy securities from “structured investment vehicles” they had left off their balance sheets. “Amid a lack of interest, the superfund was canceled. Next came the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which has now decided not to buy troubled assets. Hello?”
Zell buys Tribune. “This $13 billion deal, which gave Sam Zell control of the nation’s second-biggest newspaper firm last year, has resulted in cuts this year that are disastrous for anyone who cares about having an informed public.”
Raiding the Times. “Philip Falcone’s Harbinger hedge fund gobbled up enough New York Times Co. stock to scare the company into giving him two seats on its board. Alas for his investors, he’s down about 60 percent on a $512 million investment”
“There are plenty of other candidates: Merrill Lynch (yesterday’s price: $11.53) spending $5.27 billion in 2007 buying its own stock at an average of $84.88 per share. Or a group led by the normally sure-footed TPG buyout house (formerly Texas Pacific Group) putting $7 billion into Washington Mutual five months before regulators seized it and wiped out shareholders. Then there are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and American International Group.”
We’re going to need a bigger coop.
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