If you're a Pfizer shareholder you should be glad Ian Read and his crew at the big pharmaceutical finally tossed in the towel on the Astra-Zenica deal.
It was smelly from the start. This should be viewed as a victory for the little guy and a clear defeat for Wall Street bankers and their big 2014 bonuses. Now Read will have to lead this huge amalgam and earn his salary, what shareholders are paying him to do.
And the same can be said for Leif Johansson and Pascal Soriot, the two leaders at Astra credited with crafting the anti-takeover scheme that for now has apparently worked. It's now money-where-your mouth-is time for all.
How do you pay these big boys, by putting your confidence and your investment dollars where your mouth is. But be apprised you need to stay focused. Free lunches are the parlor games of bureaucrats and the PC crowd.
What you're buying with your confidence and investment is growth and productivity, not accounting legerdemain or one-off sidesteps. We've said it before and we'll repeat it here. Corporate US taxes are not just too high; they're way too high.
Should dividends and overseas corporate earnings be double taxed? Absolutely not. And that segues into our next thought, the weekend EU election results.
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Political pundits will do their best to play down the voter discontent with the EU and its future. It might have even dragged the Dragster, ECB President Mario Draghi, out of his catatonic state and forced him to show the awaiting globe that he indeed has a pair.
But don't forget there are 22 other economic eunuchs on that board. That's what you get when you tolerate committee rule, the hallmark of the EU. Here in US the bureaucrats are doing their best to emulate Brussels, so the outlook for any meaningful change is, as one of my old college professors used to write on my term paper evaluations, grim.
For sure a half-way decent economic recovery will dull memories, something bureaucrats the world over hope for. But it will not significantly, structurally fix much. The Obama administration's foreign policy timidity is another tinder box.
As noted in today's Financial Times, governments from Japan to Saudi Arabia are starting to get the feeling. Like the words of an old Olivia Newton-John song:
Let me be there in your mornin'
Let me be there in you night
Let me change whatever's wrong and make it right
They're having increasing doubts about the U.S. wanting to be there.
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