Such a feast! And the
nieces and nephews are growing up to be such great people! Charles cooked a spectacular dinner for 34 –
and is now at JFK headed to London. His brother the priest is at the airport headed
for Nigeria. My brother the scholar is at the airport
headed for Oakland. And I am at the airport – we are all at JFK
in different terminals – headed South. Eat your heart out Marco Polo. I even have TV in the seatback in front of
me.
AL
FRANKEN ON THE STUMP
One of the things I failed to mention in my things-to-be-thankful-for
list Wednesday was that most of us are Americans. What did we
do to be born here? We just got
lucky. (See John Rawls’ veil of
ignorance.)
But reading a recent profile of Senate candidate Al
Franken, I thought this excerpt somehow fit with the holiday:
Another transformation seems to be happening to Franken on the
campaign trail. In the past, he’s often
been portrayed as an angry grouch, and indeed his books are as depressing
as they are funny in their meticulous detailing of America’s woes. But all this exposure to the youth of today—and
media consultants—has had an uplifting
effect on Franken. “A lot of the kids I was talking to, the freshmen were
like 11 years old when Bush became president, and they don’t remember having a
president who was articulate; they don’t remember that the federal government
actually could work; they don’t remember when America was a really
well-respected country,” Franken tells me later. “And I felt my job was to tell
them, No, no, no! We used to be the leader of the world and we can be again! We’re the country that went to the moon and
we’re the country that beat Fascism and Communism and rebuilt Europe and we’re
the country that’s mapped the human genome and we’re the country that had
enough juice left over to invent the Internet and rock and roll, you know?
I mean, we’re a great country! So I found myself sort of cheerleading. I was
giving not just them but myself a pep talk. Sometimes I say the reason I’m
running is my dad’s generation was the Greatest Generation, and I just don’t
want ours to be the Worst Generation.” He laughs his bullfrog laugh. “I wanna actually
be able to look at my kids and say I tried my damnedest to get us up to the
Mediocre Generation. I really did everything I could.”
ANOTHER
SPACULATION
If cash will be king next year, you may want to consider the units
– or perhaps the stock or the warrants – of another SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition
Company, or “blank check” company) whose offering was significantly
oversubscribed last month. It is the
NRDC Acquisition Company, one of whose principals I know to be a smart guy (and
with whom, full disclosure, I have some business dealings). Which is a guarantee of
nothing. But to be sitting on
$400 million in cash these days could be a good place to sit – especially when
each NAQ share currently sells for
about $9.20, yet represents
$9.82 in cash.
Unlike the HAPN cliffhanger, whose acquisition could have been
quashed if 20% of the shareholders had demanded their cash back, this one
requires 30% of all the shares to be redeemed to quash the deal.
So Wednesday I bought some units for $10.03 and some warrants for 92 cents.
If no deal is done, those 92-cent warrants expire worthless. If a deal is
done, they entitle you to buy the underlying stock for $7.50 until October 17,
2011 (unless the stock trades at or above $14.25 for 20 days and the company
chooses to force conversion).
So, on the warrants, heads you lose 92 cents, tails you turn 92
cents into $6.75 (the right to buy a $14.25 stock for $7.50 being worth $6.75) . . .
except that this coin anology suggests a 50-50
chance, when in fact no one knows the odds of the two outcomes – and there
could be intermediate outcomes. The
stock could be $9, say, four years from now, or $10. You do okay,
if the stock is $9 or $10 when the warrants expire but not nearly as okay as
you would have done if it were $14.25.
Buying the warrants is highly (but I think not stupidly) speculative. Buying the units is low risk (if you don’t
like the deal, you can eventually exercise your right to get most of, or quite
possibly a bit more than, your money back).
Buying the stock, likewise.
What I like about this is that, if the economy goes to hell as it
may, that could work in favor of smart guys sitting on $400 million.
Here
is the full prospectus.