Tuesday is D-Day for Northern Rock
Well one of them anyway.
It's the day of the shareholders meeting called by hedge funds RAB and SRM to prevent the Northern Rock board flogging off the company on the cheap (as they see it).
As we've said before, a private solution for the bank depends on the willingness of bankers (Royal Bank of Scotland, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank) to lend around £15bn.
So far they don't seem all that willing, although the government has had Goldman Sachs on the case and The Sunday Times, for one, thinks they've come up a with a credible finance package, involving bonds issued to rich sovereign fund investors, as well as loans.
Failing that, the government has lined up City veteran Ron Sandler, who dealt capably with the fallout from the great Lloyds insurance market scandal a decade or so ago, to step in as executive chairman of a nationalised Northern Rock (with the government presumably guaranteeing RBS and co's money).
In which case, lending to Northern Rock is money for old rope. So it might be nationalised after all.
No more fruit and flowers at EMI
"Fruit and flowers" is the music industry euphemism for all those nice things, many of doubtful legality, that keep rock stars going and, apparently, the epic amounts of money EMI used to spend on them was one of the things that first shocked financier Guy Hands when his private equity company Terra Firma bought EMI for £3.2bn.
Now Hands is planning to slash the company's workforce after instructing his "artistes" that they had to work a bit harder (by delivering records in return for their generous advances, among other things).
Unsurprisingly, the artists are up in arms. Sir Paul McCartney and Radiohead have upped sticks already and the company's biggest band Coldplay is "considering" its options.
Hands' problem is that one of the private equity tricks, refinancing debt in the markets, is no longer a possibility in the credit crunch and he has to pay backer Citigroup (which has problems of its own, of course) £150m in a few weeks' time.
So he has to fall back on good old industrial management; cutting costs and increasing productivity. But this is not so easy in the music business because these great big entertainment companies actually depend on the good offices of a very small number of very rich performers, most of whom make far more money from touring these days than they do from sales of CDs and downloads.
He's already sold his fruit and flowers emporium in Mayfair for £5.6m (to a hedge fund no doubt) but raising productivity is a far harder call.
Hands fought back in FT this morning, saying he hadn't overpaid for EMI, was about to raise a further £200m of equity to fund the job cuts, that running a record company was no different to running anything else and that his purpose at EMI was "to monetise music for the artist".
He also pointed out that just 200 or so of EMI's acts made any money for the label and that there were an average of 19 managers, marketing executives and lawyers for each A&R man (talent scout).
Allan Leighton, the Royal Mail chairman who's one of a bunch of middle-aged executives including former BBC boss John Birt that Hands has brought in to help him, chipped in with the observation that "the model's broke, it is not the sort of thing you can tinker with".
I doubt that EMI is so different to any other music company though and mending a whole industry is a pretty tall order, and probably not what Hands had in mind when he borrowed all that money.
It's a case of the credit crunch hitting real life, at least as far as the hundreds if not thousands of EMI staff about to be out on their ear are concerned.
Robbie takes another hit
Not EMI's Robbie Williams (who's already trousered vast amounts of EMI's cash) but Robbie Tchenguiz, the property and stock market investor who bet on both Sainsbury's and pub group Mitchell & Butler in the belief that he (and others, like the Qataris in the case of Sainsbury's) could persuade them to spin off their property interests into separate companies.
The credit crunch, among other factors, has done for both deals and Robbie is looking at big losses (he bought his shares through so-called contracts for difference, a bit like a spread bet).
Now it emerges he's lost another £80m on gaming company SCi Entertainment, holder of the Lara Croft franchise.
He bought his shares at around 500p and they closed on Friday at 62p after the company said it hadn't found a buyer and was running out of cash. They kept falling in early trading this morning.
SCi has no substantial property interests I'm aware of, so this really does look like a foolish punt. Gaming firms suffer from more peaks and (rather more) troughs than even the music business.
I wonder what else Robbie has put his money into?
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of 北京赛车pk10, 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.