AT&T Near Deal to Buy Bell South
The wall Street Journal breaks with the hottest news about possible acquisition of Bell South by AT&T
AT&T Inc. is nearing the acquisition of BellSouth Corp. for roughly $65 billion, people familiar with the situation said Saturday evening. A deal could be announced as early as Monday, these people said.
Final terms of the deal could not be learned Saturday evening, but these people said AT&T Inc. would pay a premium for BellSouth shares of at least 15%, valuing the company at $36 per share at least, up from its trading price Friday of $31.46. That would push the total equity value of the deal to at least $65 billion, plus the assumption of an additional $17 billion of BellSouth debt.
This, if the report is accurate, is another indication for the death of the telecom act of 1996. In Telecom alone not only that the competition didn’t increase it actually decreased, allowing the old baby bells activities (such aa providing long distance service) in which they were not allowed before.
And although the FCC might try to take credit for the competition between the Telecom companies and the cable companies they do not deserve it. The competition between the cable companies and the Telecom, and in the near future with the utilities companies, happening despite the government involvement not thanks to it.
And just to set the record straight: I do not think that the government should prevent the deal between Bell South and AT&T, I’m just hoping that the government will stop disturb the market at all.
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Irony here, is that ATT is basically buying back what it CREATED in the first place but had to give up by force because of the Government. So now all the acquisition costs will have to be paid by ATT (and their customers) and Bellsouth (and their customers).
If the Government would have kept it's meddling hands to itself and just allowed businesses to compete, we'd have the competition we have now and probably better service from all of these telecom companies.
I'll bet they've spent billions of dollars over the years compensating for their forced competition created by the Government.
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good points, thanks
The irony started earlier when the government forced the ATT monopoly to ensure phone service in rural areas. So we got cycle of government forced monopoly, government breaking the monopoly, government Inventing competition and the next episode is legal cost of the procedures to approve the merger (which is the result of the government involvement to begin with).
can you follow? I can't! and at the end the consumer doesn't get better service at all, but need to pay the expenses.
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You have to be fair and admit that the telecom companies are using the government to enforce rules that will be to their benefit. If the government is at all involved network neutrality is better then the other options.
The problem is that Government regulation do not improve, or regulate the market. And every time that Regulating fail we getting more regulations to fix the former wave.
It is not only the Socialists it is also the republicans that actually acting as the companies agents. The best deal was if it was really free from government regulations.
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