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It's D-Day for Global's GCap bid
Charles Allen's Global Radio has until 5pm today to make its bid for GCap Radio, owner of Capital and Classic FM.

The new company, backed by Ireland's "Coolmore Mafia", has been enjoying a further week of due diligence looking at GCap's books and the Sunday Times reported yesterday that it was worried about a possible fine for dodgy phone-ins, on the TV model. Also, savvy media investor Fidelity dumped a large line of stock on Friday, taking its profits early.

I wonder what GCap's new CEO Fru Hazlitt makes of it all? She either walks away with £1m for a few weeks' work or maybe she will get her chance to run GCap after all.

Tesco finds it's not all plain sailing in the US
The Sunday Telegraph thinks that Tesco's US Fresh & Easy chain has failed to hit sales targets and growth has been pegged at 59 California stores while it works out what went wrong. This venture was never going to as easy as some commentators thought -- the US is a veritable graveyard for British businesses (and supermarket businesses don't travel well anyway, even the mighty Wal-Mart failed spectacularly to crack Germany and is even rumoured to be dissatisfied with Asda's growth in the UK).

A decade or more ago, Sainsbury's tried to invade the US with an East (as opposed to West) Coast strategy through the Shaw's chain.

Shaw's survived but was eventually sold.

Tesco will probably get there in the end though.

Pernod snaps up Absolut vodka for $7bn
French drinks giant Pernod Ricard appears to have won the auction for Sweden's state-owned Vin & Spirit, owner of Absolut Vodka.

Pernod beat US company Fortune Brands in the last round after Bacardi and Swedish buyout group EQT dropped out.

But $7bn is a chunky price for even a brand like Absolut in today's markets (you could probably buy the whole UK pubs industry for something like that) but Absolut is clearly the sort of brand that will appeal to those prosperous quaffers in the emerging BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

It remains to be seen if Pernod will actually be able to raise the money.

Rock promises to repay taxpayers
Northern Rock is to announce its long-delayed 2007 results today and new boss Ron Sandler is expected to say that he will repay the Treasury's £24bn of loans by 2010.

So some good news at last for Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown.

Makes you wonder why they didn't nationalise it in the first place, especially as Sandler will reveal that the hard-pressed Rock has paid out £50m in fees to investment bankers and lawyers.

Investors flee stock market equity funds
Global investors pulled $100bn out of equity funds (like US mutual funds and UK unit trusts) in the first quarter of 2008.

This compares with net inflows of $19bn in the same period of 2007 and $49bn the year before.

By contrast, sovereign wealth funds (the investment arms of mainly Eastern and Far Eastern governments) had assets of $3,300bn (is that trillion?) in 2007, another sign of the shift of wealth from west to east.

Mind you, the sovereign wealth funds have seen some of the money disappear this year as the big stakes they took in struggling Wall Street banks have fallen dramatically in value as the write-offs have continued to roll in.

I doubt they will fall for that one again.

M&C Saatchi stays optimistic -- for now
M&C Saatchi made nearly £8m in 2007, turning round a loss of £1.2m as its consultancy business and increased stake in Walker Media flowed through to the bottom line.

CEO David Kershaw said that business remained good although he was worried that advertisers seemed to be taking a shorter and shorter view.

But Kershaw's been around long enough to know that they always do, whenever times get hard, whatever the IPA thinks they ought to do.

M&C, formed by Maurice and Charles when they were defenestrated from the old Saatchi & Saatchi by Chicago fund manager David Herro, has performed astonishingly well.

It's now the most serious rival to long-term UK number one agency Omnicom's Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, a considerable achievement, as well as the hub of global mini-network.

And it doesn't even have the British Airways account any more (in the current Terminal 5 circumstances, probably a blessing).

Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be bumpy
Markets in Japan and Hong Kong fell sharply this morning and London's FTSE 100 dropped in early trading before rallying a bit.

Last week was a [relatively] good week on both sides of the Atlantic as the markets warmed to the action taken by US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke to push more liquidity into the market and support the housing market by allowing state-owned mortgage providers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to borrow more money.

The London market is already factoring in at last a quarter point cut in interest rates in April (God help Bank governor Mervyn King if he doesn't do it).

This won't feed through into actual mortgage rates yet but it will speed up the revival in bank balance sheets (basically by handing them a profit).
But the markets will be expecting to see some sign soon that all this extra liquidity is having an effect. So they'll remain twitchy in the extreme.

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.