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How contagious is Wall Street's sickness?
They used to say that when Wall Street caught a cold the rest of the world suffered from influenza. In the late 1920s, it meant that the world economy took to its bed for a decade or more. It's not quite that bad now but Wall Street's travails are still dragging down the world economy and there's no sign of a respite.

Wall Street (the main indexes, the Dow Jones of big companies, the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the broader S&P 500) closed down once again in February, the fourth month of consecutive losses.

They're not down that much, about 7.5% over the four-month period, but it still hurts.

What's interesting is that any trader who had bought shares at the start of the week over this period would be ahead, and any sucker who'd bought on Friday would be bust.

Most weeks shares have rallied from the previous week's awful Friday and then taken a tumble later on as another bit of bad economic news has come out and traders have either banked their profits or cut their losses. No one wants to leave a big position open over the weekend.

But the Dow fell 315 points on Friday and that's a big loss to claw back. The news on US houses just gets worse, with sales falling through the floor and now fears that a whole other raft of mortgages -- above sub-prime but not that much -- are at risk.

Already we've seen a couple of UK hedge funds exposed to these things hit the buffers as banks have withdrawn their gambling money.

In the meantime, the US dollar is still sinking (making US imports more expensive and therefore adding to inflation), US lenders are unsportingly ignoring the Federal Reserve's cut in interest rates to 3% by continuing to offer mortgages at 6.8% and no one knows what to do about it all.

Things won't be helped today as bank HSBC, not a US company but big there all the same time, has announced a chunky £8.7bn write-off, thanks largely to its decision to buy US sub-prime lender Housing Finance Corporation a couple of years ago.

So if US markets start the week lower we really may be into a "bear" market (ie, a long term decline) as, on current form, they don't do end-of-the-week rallies over there.

The omens certainly aren't good: The Nikkei in Tokyo fell 600 points or 4.5% this morning and London opened nearly a hundred points down although it rallied slightly in early trading.

It would probably be a good thing longer term if an investment bank or big hedge fund did go bust as it might teach these would-be "masters of the universe" bankers a salutary lesson.
It's a bit more likely now than it was at the start of the year.

Virgin Media opens up opportunity for others
Less than a year ago Virgin Media, the combination of NTL and Telewest with a bit of Sir Richard Branson stardust sprinkled on top, was trying to buy ITV.

That deal was scuppered by Sky buying a 17.9% stake (which it's now got to reduce, according to the Competition Commission).

A great opportunity for Virgin to go back to ITV then, but the credit crunch has seen that one off.

Virgin Media is quoted in New York and, even though the company or its components have never looked like making a profit, at one point last year private equity fund Carlyle was apparently thinking of offering $33 a share for the company.

Its shares are now trading at $15 and looking somewhat sickly.

Now, according to the Sunday Times, it's looking to unload its half share of UKTV, the digital broadcaster it owns with the BBC and whose channels include UKTV Gold and UKTV History (now reduced to showing reruns of 'Antiques Roadshow') plus Bravo and Living. A price tag of £800m is mentioned, optimistically.

The company is never going to be able to challenge Sky effectively in the UK (its only sphere of operations), indeed it seems to have thrown in the towel, being wholly uninterested in adding new channels to its portfolio.

Now if ITV's Michael Grade was more of a wheeler-dealer he might think about buying these channels, or all of Virgin Media.

That really would the quantum leap the market is looking for at ITV, and it would increase the heat on Sky too.

Premier Foods goes from hero to zero
Fortunes change pretty rapidly in these markets, as Premier Foods boss Robert Schofield is finding out. A year ago, he bought RHM's bread business for £1.2bn only to find the price of wheat (and the money he’d borrowed to do the deal) rocketing.

Premier could be one of those companies that did well as a niche business (buying unwanted brands like Mr Kipling and Angel Delight) but comes unstuck when it tries to get bigger.

The trouble is that dealmakers, like Premier, don't really have any Plan B.

Now Premier is valued at a mere £800m with debts of some £2bn and it's going to have to reveal details of its banking arrangements to mollify anxious shareholders.

At the very least it's going to need to pull in its horns over the next year or two to concentrate on paying down its not inconsiderable debts (roughly equal to the turnover of the company).

But there's a strong possibility that the great FMCG acquirer will become a bid target itself.

Stephen Foster is a former news editor of ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.