Good morning, dear readers,
yesterday evening at around 9:30 p.m. German time, after around two hours, the New York Supreme Court said: Donald has left the building. The former President of the United States had pleaded not guilty to 34 counts before Judge Juan Merchan. Donald Trump then left the court without addressing onlookers or journalists. The judge has scheduled the next appointment for December 4th.
The first criminal case against an ex-president in US history involves hush money payments made in 2016 to a former porn actress, a former Playboy model and a bouncer who claims to have information about the ex-president’s illegitimate child. to have presidents. Trump is accused of falsifying business records to cover up the payments as business expenses.
According to the public prosecutor, he wanted to hide information that was harmful to him before and after the 2016 presidential election. Much of the investigation is based on statements by Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney.
Trump spoke up about the accusation that night with a speech from his Mar-A-Lago club in Florida. Among other things, he claimed, “The only crime I committed was the fearless defense of our nation against those who would destroy it.”
The cabinet wants to decide on a paradigm shift in competition law today. In the future, the Federal Cartel Office should be able to intervene in markets where there is insufficient competition. At present, the cartel office can only intervene if it detects illegal behavior such as price fixing.
The law came into effect in early summer 2022: After the start of the Ukraine war, fuel prices continued to rise – although oil prices were already falling again. A lack of competition between gas stations and refineries made this possible. But the cartel office could not intervene, because illegal price fixing could not be proven.
According to our reporters in the capital, the FDP in particular is alien to the law within the traffic light. I can hardly believe that, because competition policy is known to be the litmus test to distinguish a real market economist from a corporate tycoon.
(Photo: IMAGO/PanoramaC)
It will also be about corporate interests when EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron fly to China today. On Thursday, a joint meeting with head of state and party leader Xi Jinping is on the agenda. Two top European politicians are arriving, who repeatedly set different accents in China policy, analyzes Handelsblatt reporter Dana Heide: “Macron is the good cop, von der Leyen is the bad cop. This division of roles could prove to be a smart move – or result in embarrassment.”
In a keynote speech on China last week, Von der Leyen warned that the EU must prevent the capital and know-how of European companies from contributing to “improving the military and intelligence capabilities of those who are also system competitors”. Von der Leyen made it clear which role she sees for herself in Beijing: the bad cop.
And Macron? He is traveling with a large business delegation. 50 top managers accompany him to sign lucrative contracts. Among them are the bosses of Airbus, Alstom and EDF. Even more clearly than Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who only took a small business delegation with him on his controversial trip to China last year, Macron is sending the signal that Beijing wants to see: business as usual in the land of smiles.
If a corporate executive buys a company for more than it is worth on its balance sheet, he can then add the overpaid money as “goodwill” to the value of his own company. The more expensive you buy, the more valuable your own group becomes, at least in the short term.
These days we can see a particularly rare Edelweiss on the balance sheet in Switzerland: the “Badwill”. The major Zurich bank UBS is likely to post record profits this year. This is due to the difference between the purchase price paid (low) and the balance sheet equity (high) of Credit Suisse, which was acquired in March. UBS paid $3 billion for a company that reported about $43 billion in equity. In addition, by order of the supervisors, another $16 billion in subordinated debt was canceled. Less the purchase price, UBS therefore reports a “badwill” of $56 billion.
UBS can deduct any restructuring costs from the badwill. The sum after deducting such costs is added to UBS as equity. Analysts expect the UBS book value to increase by between 35 and 40 billion dollars. At least this increase in value should appear on the balance sheet as a special profit, in addition to UBS’s operating income.
For comparison: UBS’s previous record profit in 2005 was around 15 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, our Zurich correspondent Jakob Blume reports paradoxes: While normal corporate managers like to hide how overpriced their acquisitions really were, UBS definitely doesn’t want to brag about the bargain they got with the Credit Suisse purchase. A discussion is already raging in Switzerland as to whether UBS cheated Swiss politicians and bank supervisors in the nightly negotiations in mid-March.
I’m confident about UBS. The Swiss have always been great at keeping their own wealth hidden, right?
Yesterday I took the liberty of making a sneering remark about the short-lived nature of Liz Taylor’s marriages. It would have been much more contemporary to use the length of Rupert Murdoch’s engagement as a benchmark. According to Vanity Fair, the 92-year-old media magnate called off his two-week engagement to 66-year-old radio host Ann Lesley Smith. The US magazine quotes a source as saying Murdoch had become increasingly uncomfortable with Smith’s evangelical views.
Although ill-intentioned people could certainly see God’s just punishment in it if the founder of the arch-conservative news channel Fox News had to spend the coming years under constant fundamental Christian noise.
I wish you a day when old love doesn’t rust.
Best regards
Your Christian Rickens
Editor-in-Chief Handelsblatt
