Can Global land GCap and Virgin?
It seems a bit unlikely but most pundits think Global Radio, Charles Allen's new radio company, which already owns Heart and Galaxy, will snap up GCap Media (which owns Capital and Heart) for £371m.
It's also the frontrunner for Virgin Radio, which Scottish Media Group is trying to unload for about half the generous amount it paid DJ Chris Evans for it a few years ago.
But surely Ofcom and/or the Competition Commission will look hard at a Global/GCap combo, let alone all three together.
The trouble is, Global is the only buyer in radio these days with the exception of German publisher Bauer, which bought Emap’s radio stations along with its consumer mags at the end of last year.
Global and GCap are supposed to be agreeing a deal before the bid deadline of March 26.
You can't blame GCap's shareholders for wanting out, but it's hard to see how commercial radio as a medium will benefit from the Allen effect (cost-cutting, he's an accountant after all).
BBC Radio bosses, who are already trampling all over commercial radio, must think their birthdays have all come at once.
Meanwhile, back at Channel 4
It wants to get into radio too.
CEO Andy Duncan, the former marketing chief at the BBC, is due to unveil his vision of the future for Channel 4 this week and he's expected to say it needs a government subsidy, partly because it wants to expand into digital radio (it’'s already hired BBC Radio 5's Bob Shennan) and other platforms, like the internet.
Quite why the taxpayer should have to stump up for these ventures, or indeed to sustain C4, is a bit of a mystery.
C4 is already protected by legislation that allows it access to all the available audience without pesky shareholders to worry about. Most broadcasters would kill for a franchise like that.
The channel makes good money at the moment, £67m in 2006, although its viewing figures are dropping sharply (down 10% last year, as ITV's Michael Grade helpfully reminded us last week).
Duncan's thesis is that analogue switch-off in 2012 will hammer C4 particularly hard because the enlarged digital spectrum will allow in loads more competitors. But surely C4 has long enough to prepare for this?
And investing millions in radio is hardly likely to help the situation.
Anyway, if GCap Media's worth £371m, what's C4 worth?
Full metal jackets on Wall Street?
It should be time to don your tin hats in the markets, with the financial community in the US stating pretty unanimously that the economy's in recession already, Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and George Bush saying it isn't (but they would, wouldn’t they) and Goldman Sachs muttering about the possibility of $200 a barrel oil prices.
On top of that, banking analysts (who should be pretty pleased to be still in a job, given the prodigious amounts of money their employers have lost) are saying the banks will have to make further writedowns as they're currently assuming they'll lose 15% of their mortgage investments whereas the reality is closer to 30% (if they're lucky).
Bernanke is likely to slash interest rates another half point soon, reducing them to a bargain basement 2.5%.
The trouble is the banks are ignoring all this and charging what they see fit, nearly 6% to each other and appreciably more to consumers (companies as well as individuals).
So, logically, the markets should head sharply south this week, a pretty worrying prospect as the three main US indexes (Dow Jones, S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq) all lost about 2.6% last week.
I've a feeling they won't bomb again (not to the same extent anyway) as some shares are looking pretty cheap, assuming that company earnings don't collapse, of course.
Tokyo and Hong Kong slipped back this morning and London opened lower but promptly recovered (I doubt this was due to optimism about Alistair Darling's first Budget, due on Wednesday).
Markets are about sentiment as much as reality and, once the recession story's out of the way the next thing on the agenda will be the recovery story (when and by how much)?
Food for thought
It's finally dawning on the world that, as well as a climate change crisis, we have a food crisis and it's good old competition to blame.
Rising living standards among (some) people in China and India mean that they are competing for meat and dairy produce too and we also have farmers switching crops like maize to ethanol production.
This will only increase as the oil price soars.
In October 2006 asset manager Schroders set up something called the Alternative Solutions Agriculture Fund which invested in grains and livestock.
This has returned 48% since launch, not that high by the standards of some hedge funds but hardly likely to implode either, as some hedge funds are now doing.
Not that this stops companies trying to ape their style.
Credit Suisse has just signed up two professors from the London Business School and one from Duke University to replicate hedge fund strategies by computer.
Credit Suisse is to launch three funds using the profs' findings and proposes to charge the usual 15% to 20% cut, even though it should be able to manage without the highly paid managers.
This is worryingly reminiscent of an outfit called Long Term Capital Management set up by three boffins a few years ago.
LTCM proved to be disappointingly short term, losing $4.6bn in 1998 and causing a mini-banking crisis all of its own in the process.
But that was along time ago of course.
Mind you, you can see the attraction of dispensing with those expensive managers.
Goldman Sachs has just announced that it paid its two co-presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried $67.5m each last year, just below CEO Lloyd Blankfein's $68.5m package.
Goldman did make $11.6bn last year even after paying staff and partners $20.2bn, so it can hardly be accused of profligacy.
After all, the bank doesn't actually make anything, nor does it need to pay people to cash cheques or arrange mortgages and insurance.
Masters of the Universe indeed. Not bad for a business that began as German immigrant Marcus Goldman's New York market stall in 1869.
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.
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