Australians are a sports-mad lot. So it’s fitting that one of the country’s most hotly contested deals involving overseas private equity firms is for Rugby Australia. CVC Capital Partners and Silver Lake are just two of the seven players, reports the Australian Financial Review, trying out to join the ownership team of the game’s national governing body. It’s an unusually competitive battle in a slow year for financial sponsors. It’s also a teaser for the deal fest buyout shops are gearing up for Down Under.
Europe wants to keep its home-grown innovators from going abroad in search of new funding, not just new sales. Yet national barriers make the European Union’s single market more of a dream than a financing resource. Far from adding red tape, joined-up supervision is a benefit the EU could offer its entrepreneurs.
Since Meta Platforms' close competitor Twitter was taken off the public market by Elon Musk nine months ago, the equity value of the social media company has soared. But that isn’t enough for boss Mark Zuckerberg. On Wednesday, he launched a Twitter competitor, Threads, promptly encouraging Twitter to threaten to sue. Zuckerberg isn’t doing shareholders any favors.
Quitting doesn’t pay like it used to. The raises Americans earn from switching jobs is shrinking, narrowing their advantage in wage gains versus job-keepers. That stands to reduce inflation, as companies benefit from lower costs when snagging new employees. While it’s happened without mass layoffs, weaker pay gains signal that the labor market’s balance of power is shifting back to businesses.
Being a bank investor was already hard enough in 2023. Shareholders who thought rising interest rates were a one-way bet realised otherwise when losses on long-term bonds helped sink Silicon Valley Bank. OSB , a specialist UK mortgage lender, just threw another curveball. The group’s market value, which was 2 billion pounds ($2.5 billion) when markets closed on Thursday, fell by one-quarter on Friday, after a trading statement released the previous evening. In it, OSB said it will take a roughly 170 million pound hit to revenue because customers were refinancing home loans quicker than expected.