This is never an exact science, to be sure (reading tea leaves, it is in truth) — but Mr. Davis is both a former corporate treasurer, and former CFO at a series of large public life science companies. He’s also a corporate lawyer, and tax maven.
So it is fair to assume that refinancing about $6 billion of the company’s debt — switching from shorter term, to longer term (“terming out”)… is a suggestion that he suspects rates haven’t topped off quite yet. [He also is laying in, early, some of the funding he’ll use for the $11 billion Prometheus deal, announced last month.]
After all, Merck is one of the “bluest” of blue chip, A-rated public corporate debt issuers in the US. Their paper is almost as good as that of the US Treasury. So Merck gets nearly the tightest spreads over Treasuries when it prices issuances, of all corporates — pharma cash flows to service debt are huge, and very stable — like clockwork, almost.
So, in the longer term view, he must feel that this is the time to place/sell some debt — as even though rates have been nearly constantly rising since 2021 — he must think that action is not yet over, in the medium term.
Moreover, one might also read it as Mr. Davis expects the Democratic Party will hold the White House on and after 2024, since (very broadly speaking) interest rates tend to rise (and persist at higher levels) during Democratic administrations. Tighter money overall.
He may be expecting eight more years, minimum (after Tangerine was just found liable by a federal jury, for forcible sexual assault in the amount of $5 million). But that last bit is just… spit-balling, now. We shall see…. Onward, grinning.
While the first few episodes drag a bit. . . in order to set-up the back story many in the US may not know (as few here followed closely the history of George III, from whom we in America later liberated ourselves, by force), by the last three episodes (of six)… it is a sweet, rollicking good yarn. Full of lessons — for scientists of the night skies.
Do catch it, binge it this weekend, even — on Netflix. very crown-worthy:
“…We are one Crown. His weight is mine, and mine is his. One Crown….”
Of course, Ms. Rimes takes quite a few liberties with what is presumed to be factual history in Great Britain… but therein lies… most of the compelling fun and adventure, no? Onward!
More years ago than I’d like to count, I played competitive school and travel-team summer league basketball in the then-high school gyms, at both Woodland Park, and Manitou Springs, Colorado… for my own town, about an hour’s drive away, and higher up in the central Rocky Mountains.
So it is with great dismay that I’ve been following the MAGA takeover (styled after the tactics of DeSantis’ forces, now underway in the Florida public school take-overs) — of the Woodland Park school board. [The nearby town of Manitou Springs remains a safe, sane place for kids to go to the public schools — if they wish to learn real history. So, most parents are transferring their kids to that district, come this Fall.]
Even so, I would ask you to follow, and publicize, this blog — and the article linked and quoted below, respectively. This is what MAGA forces have in mind, in smaller, sleepy towns — like Woodland Park, Colorado — that were caught largely unaware, due in no small part to the holding of illegitimate, in-secret school board meetings. [Those violated local law, by the way — but litigation and appeals are ongoing — and take years.] Here is a bit:
…Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building….
[Woodland Park parents] discovered that Witt, as president of the school board in… Jefferson County [down the front range, about an hour’s drive — and abutting Denver, the capital], supported a plan in 2014 to ensure the district’s curricula would promote patriotism and not encourage “social strife.” Witt said students who protested the board policies at the time were “pawns” of the teachers union.
After he and two other conservative members of the board were recalled, Witt became executive director of an organization that oversees charter, online and other schools and helped launch Merit Academy…. [He would later take the helm in Woodland Park, after a school board meeting held in secret, but captured on security videos, in December 2022.]
Laura Magnuson, the district’s mental health supervisor, had a call with Witt to press him on reapplying for grants for mental health professionals. She had emailed him to warn that due dates were coming up, and a couple had already passed. If the district did not reapply, it would lose $1.2 million in annual funds that covered the salaries of 15 positions, such as counselors, social workers and career and college readiness specialists.
The following week, after she couldn’t convince Witt to reapply for the grants, she sent him her resignation.
“I feel most worried that this new vision will leave our most vulnerable students and families behind,” Magnuson, who declined an interview request, wrote in an email to Witt….
That private meeting — which was captured by a surveillance camera — became a flash point. Any time three or more members of a school board gather and discuss the district, the meeting must be open to the public under Colorado law. People in the community began clamoring for the district to release the footage.
Witt declined. The district argued in response to one mother’s lawsuit that the conversation “was of a personal nature,” and that it would be a security risk to disclose where the surveillance camera was placed.
Teller County District Court Judge Scott Sells disagreed and said he found it “troubling, the lack of transparency by the school board and the school district.” Sells ordered the video to be released, but the district appealed and the case is still pending….
This is not the way America works. We change policies, if that is to occur… in PUBLIC meetings, after notice to, and comment by, concerned parents. The ideology is troubling enough, but because they know the agenda is divisive, they implement it in secret. Deplorable. [Hinderaker’s “think tank” is trying these same tactics, in almost exclusively rural Minnesota (former agrarian and strip-mining) communities, day in and day out. FUGLY.]
But let us close this on a better (Julie Taymar infused) note — or a set of decidedly more hopeful notes, in fact:
Well… both Phoenixus and Vyera filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware federal court early this morning. Phoenixus AG (on an operating basis) had about $7.7 million in sales so far in 2023, and lost over $6.3 million, just so far — as treated by US GAAP accounting. Hilarious. [The WSJ has a piece on this, but I’ve not read it — so if we disagree… trust me not the capitalists’ paper of record. Heh.]
We will have more when the more detailed schedules are filed, but we are not surprised by the picture painted here — of failure, after Martin Shkreli’s lawless sprees. Not surprisingly, the biggest unpaid creditor (at over $2 million) is the fine law firm known as Duane Morris, the company’s (and Martin’s) defense counsel in the FTC case, that saw Martin banned for life. The consolidated group had to pay Martin’s legal bills under an indemnity agreement — but now the group cannot pay, and all insurance is exhausted. So Duane Morris is likely to take a hit here.
To be clear, none of these machinations will allow Martin Shkreli or the companies to escape liability for the $60 some million under the FTC judgment, or the now nearly $6 million Martin personally owes Thomas Koestler. Those debts cannot be discharged in any bankruptcy.
In addition, in the next post (which I won’t get to until tomorrow, as the day job calls!), besides Mr. Abbott, as receiver for Thomas Koestler (at just over 31%), and by far the largest holder of Phoenixus AG (seized from Martin in the federal courts in Manhattan last year), I’ll also line out the names of all remaining holders of equity interests in the company. His family member, named Lenore, owns around 0.28%, and Averill Powers still holds about 0.95%. The care-taker CEO Anne Kirby owns 0.11% and Nancy Retzlaff still holds about 0.03%. None of these are likely to see a even penny of recovery.
For its part, the company DOES expect to be able to pay its unsecured creditors at least something — so there will be more to that story, as well.
There are a few other smaller entities included, Regnum Corp., the public ’34 Act reporting company, SevenScore and Oakrum, for example — but as I say, all these are smaller.
The power, and control, all always flowed downhill, from Phoenixus AG.
Onward. Indeed, it looks like Martin is, in fact, a pauper.
Slightly less than half of our number pulled the lever in 2016, for this serial criminal — and nearly word for word, all this sordid history was known then.
That is, slightly less than half of us voted for this celebrity / pig and reprobate, as the leader of the free world, despite his manifest unfitness for any office at any level.
All I will say… is let’s never make this mistake again, Americans. You know better — do better.
This site mostly just responds to whatever idiotic vitriol the Powerliners put out, but I doubt they’ll mention this event, as it offers them no upside with their base. This guy’s… indefensible (and to be clear, the original incident was from 2020).
So I’ll offer it — as original content. At right is a man who took it upon himself to go out in public, shopping at a grocery, in a San Diego market. In broad daylight.
The manager told him he’d have to leave, or take the hood off (obvious safety issue, as he might be planning a robbery, and this was his avoidance of video cams). As he was checking out, and paying, he complied. He paid cash — so no ID there.
Correctly, the police couldn’t charge him as he was silent throughout.
And he did not breach the peace. He did ultimately comply with the manager’s request to remove the hood.
So — while offensive, malevolent and disgusting… he cannot be charged. But he CAN BECOME instant famous via the internet! And that is what has happened.
I am sure many San Diegans know who he is. And in sensible society, he will be shunned.
Among his inbread knuckle-walking fellow travellers… he’s probably gotten some props.
Y A W N.
I just pray he has no children or life partner, now ashamed of him.
Damn — but it is not a situation for which the law offers remedies.
The planet’s foremost space telescope continues to deliver revolutionary science, with each passing download. As promised overnight in the rain, here is the latest, from an image that captures a view of about 14 billion miles of open space, in the night skies.
Here this morning, we see something no human eye has ever observed before: the fine details, of the dust accretion disks that ultimately congeal by the force of gravity, into rings, and then planetary bodies, around a star as it ages in place. We see at right, in many ways, back in time — to our own Sol’s “baby photos” — the earliest days of our own solar system, and how the Kuiper Belt may have formed — and remained a “debris belt“, while each of Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune (and the rest) ultimately assembled into… solid planets.
…Hubble, ALMA, and [H2] are tag-teaming to assemble a holistic view of the debris disks around a number of stars. “With Hubble and ALMA, we were able to image a bunch of Kuiper Belt analogs, and we’ve learned loads about how outer disks form and evolve,” said Wolff. “But we need [H2] to allow us to image a dozen or so asteroid belts elsewhere. We can learn just as much about the inner warm regions of these disks as Hubble and ALMA taught us about the colder outer regions.”
These belts most likely are carved by the gravitational forces produced by unseen planets. Similarly, inside our solar system Jupiter corrals the asteroid belt, the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt is sculpted by Neptune, and the outer edge could be shepherded by as-yet-unseen bodies beyond it. As [H2] images more systems, we will learn about the configurations of their planets.
Fomalhaut’s dust ring was discovered in 1983 in observations made by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). The existence of the ring has also been inferred from previous and longer-wavelength observations using submillimeter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and Caltech’s Submillimeter Observatory.
“The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets?” said George Rieke, another team member and U.S. science lead for [H2’s] Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which made these observations. “I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.”
“We definitely didn’t expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt,” added Wolff. “That structure is very exciting because any time an astronomer sees a gap and rings in a disk, they say, ‘There could be an embedded planet shaping the rings!’”
[H2] also imaged what Gáspár dubs “the great dust cloud,” which may be evidence for a collision occurring in the outer ring between two protoplanetary bodies. This is a different feature from a suspected planet first seen inside the outer ring by Hubble in 2008. Subsequent Hubble observations showed that by 2014 the object had vanished. A plausible interpretation is that this newly discovered feature, like the earlier one, is an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies that smashed into each other. . . .
Now you know… be excellent to one another, all you shepherd-, and shepherded- moons….
Mr. Saccaro is a great talent, and Joe Almeida will miss his wisdom and guidance, as a long time, well-versed Deerfield veteran. But I hear the company is going to raze the Skidmore-designed, and at the time, world renown, revolutionary vision of engineering, an architectural monument sort of World HQ, as well. So — as with so many of the the old things… these too, are passing into the mists of memory, only. [Every single one of the faces depicted in yesterday’s post… are sadly now — long dead. Wild.]
…[GE HealthCare has] named James “Jay” Saccaro as vice president and chief financial officer (CFO), succeeding Helmut Zodl who is remaining with the Company to lead special projects regarding separation from GE. These changes will take effect June 1, 2023.
“This is an outstanding team with a clear strategic vision, deep experience, and a commitment to financial discipline. I look forward to leading the finance organization as GE HealthCare executes on its strategy of delivering profitable growth and value creation for shareholders” said Saccaro.
Saccaro joins GE HealthCare from Baxter International, a global medtech leader, where he has been serving as its executive vice president and CFO since 2015. Prior to rejoining Baxter, he was senior vice president and CFO at Hill-Rom Corporation. Saccaro had previously served as corporate vice president and treasurer of Baxter from 2011 to 2013. He originally joined that company in 2002 as manager of strategy for Baxter’s BioScience business, and over the years assumed positions of increasing responsibility, including vice president of financial planning, and vice president of finance for the company’s operations in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Saccaro received a bachelor’s degree in economics and master’s degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University….
Now you know. Smiling into the warm sunshine, after overnight rains….
The completely sociopathic Tangerine cannot help himself. 
Yet he is now lying anew, about a factual matter determined by a jury trial. And those ongoing lies plainly damage Ms. Carroll’s reputation anew. 
