Merchants and Shoppers Sour on Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Saturday, August 18, 2012

Merchants and Shoppers Sour on Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

As their e-mail in-boxes filled with daily deal offers from Web sites like Groupon, Lea Pische and Edwin Hermawan, a pizzeria waitress and a former lawyer living on the Lower East Side, finally decided to buy one: a discounted Skillshare class on how to start a business.

Their business plan? It was a service that would unsubscribe people from all those daily deal e-mails.

Three months after its introduction, UnsubscribeDeals.com has 7,800 unsubscribers, a number that nearly doubled in the last month. Ms. Pische and Mr. Hermawan tapped into deal fatigue, a malady that has been afflicting the small businesses that offer daily deals and is now hitting consumers too.

Daily deal services — like Groupon, LivingSocial and Google Offers — took off because they seemed to offer something for everyone: small businesses got a novel way to bring new customers in the door, shoppers got a discount and the deal providers got a large cut of every sale.

But signs of deal fatigue are everywhere, raising questions about whether Groupon and its competitors can continue their hyper-growth.

In the last six months of 2011, 798 daily deal sites shut down, according to Daily Deal Media, which researches the industry.

When Groupon reported its second-quarter results this week, it said that active customers — defined as people who purchased a Groupon deal in the last year — grew just 1.1 percentage points, a significant slowdown from customer growth rates in previous quarters. While traffic to Groupon was higher at the beginning of 2012 than last year, it was down almost 10 percent in May and June from the same months in 2011, according to comScore.

Shares of Groupon have fallen 82 percent since it went public in November, and the company is now worth just $3 billion, half of what Google offered to buy it for in 2010.

Gilt City, a daily deal service owned by Gilt Groupe, laid off employees and closed offices in six cities earlier this year. Google Offers, whose membership has plateaued in some cities, has had to team with 35 other deal providers to supplement its own selection and help other companies reach customers. Facebook and Yelp were quick to jump on the fad, but backed off last year. Groupon is searching for alternative ways to make money, like buying movie tickets, watches and other goods and selling them to shoppers.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

GE Capital is Administrative Agent for $350 Million Asset-Based Credit Facility to Shale-Inland

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27 March 2012

GE Capital is Administrative Agent for $350 Million Asset-Based Credit Facility to Shale-Inland

NORWALK, Conn.--27 March 2012-- GE Capital, Corporate Finance today announced it is administrative agent for a $350 million asset-based credit facility to Shale-Inland Holdings, LLC to support the acquisition of HD Supply Industrial PVF, a distributor of specialty pipe, valves and fittings. GE Capital Markets served as sole bookrunner and joint-lead arranger.

Based in Schiller Park, Ill., Shale-Inland is a leading industrial supplier of products used in refining, petrochemical production and the transportation of water, food, energy, and information to its end use. Through 47 locations in North America, Shale-Inland delivers a broad spectrum of metal, pipe, valves, films, or finished parts just-in-time.

“GE Capital has a firm understanding of the steel industry and a demonstrated ability to get deals done,” said Craig T. Bouchard, CEO of Shale-Inland. “Certainty of execution allows us to capitalize on growth opportunities and build our global business.”

“With a tradition of financing the American steel industry, GE continues its strong support of metals manufacturing and distribution,” said Tom Quindlen, President and CEO of GE Capital, Corporate Finance. “We specialize in providing capital to growing mid-size companies to fuel their business plans.”

About GE Capital, Corporate Finance

GE Capital, Corporate Finance provides asset-based, cash flow and structured loans and leases to mid-size and large U.S. businesses. Financing supports working capital, growth, acquisitions, turnarounds and balance sheet optimization in key sectors: aerospace and defense; automotive and transportation; chemicals and plastics; construction and building products, corporate aircraft; financial and business services; food; manufacturing; marine; metals and mining; paper, packaging and forest products; retail; and technology and electronics. With Access GE, clients also benefit from access to GE’s best practices. Visit gelending.com/clnews.

GE Capital offers consumers and businesses around the globe an array of financial products and services. For more information, visit gecapital.com or follow company news via Twitter (@GECapital). GE (NYSE: GE) works on things that matter. The best people and the best technologies taking on the toughest challenges. Finding solutions in energy, health and home, transportation and finance. For more information, visit ge.com

Senate Probes Verizon-Cable Deal

Excerpt from an article in

TheHill.com

Senate probes Verizon-cable deal 
By Brendan Sasso

The Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights will examine Verizon's $3.6 billion deal with a coalition of cable companies on Wednesday afternoon.

Verizon agreed in December to buy wireless airwave licenses, known as spectrum, from cable companies including Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks. Under a separate deal announced simultaneously, Verizon and the cable companies agreed to cross-sell one another's services.

"The subcommittee carefully examines questions about competition in the wireless and video markets, with the ultimate goal of protecting consumers and reducing their cable and cell phone bills, and these deals are no exception," Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) said in a statement announcing the hearing.

The witnesses will be Randal Milch, Verizon's general counsel; David Cohen, Comcast's vice president; Steven Berry, CEO of the Rural Cellular Association; Joel Kelsey, policy adviser for consumer group Free Press; and Timothy Wu, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in Internet, communications and antitrust issues.

Wu served as chairman of Free Press from 2008 to 2011.

The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department are probing whether the deals will hurt competition in the wireless industry.

The Rural Cellular Association, other wireless carriers including Sprint and T-Mobile and consumer groups such as Free Press argue the spectrum deal will allow Verizon, the nation's largest wireless carrier, to consolidate its control over the airwaves, stifling competition. The groups also argue that the cross-marketing deals could lead to price-fixing or other anticompetitive behavior.

Verizon said the spectrum deal will help it meet the growing demands of smartphones and tablet computers. The company pointed out that the cable companies have no immediate plans to use the spectrum licenses.

Next Time, Greece May Need New Tactics

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Next Time, Greece May Need New Tactics

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

LONDON The Greek government was able to legally strong-arm most of its private bondholders into accepting the debt reduction deal it completed Friday. But next time — and experts predict there will almost certainly be a next time — Greece might have much less leverage.

That’s because as a result of Friday’s deal, the bulk of Athens’s 260.2 billion euros ($341 billion) in remaining government debt will now be held by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the individual European nations that have lent Greece money and contributed to the region’s bailout fund.

Politically, Greece would be hard-pressed to force debt losses on such a formidable international group, the way it did with the private banks and hedge funds that have just been forced to accept a 75 percent loss on their Greek bond holdings. Greece’s main creditors, in effect, are now foreign taxpayers — who are likely to be much less malleable than the private creditors if Greece needs to renegotiate its staggering debt load a year or two down the road.

“From now on, whatever happens in Greece, it will be a matter between Greece and the taxpayers of the rest of the euro area,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, an analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The final private creditor deal announced Friday was agreed to by nearly 86 percent of the bondholders; the number was expected to rise to 95 percent after Athens invoked a so-called collective action clause forcing others to join in. Without such a deal, Greece had strongly implied, it might default altogether, with no one getting paid. The outcome has enabled Greece to reduce its debt load by just over 100 billion euros, or about $132 billion.

Later in the day, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association ruled that the agreement was nonetheless a technical default by Greece — a ruling that will mean payouts on some insurance contracts, known as credit-default swaps, that various investors had taken out on the privately held Greek debt. Around $70 billion in default swaps on that debt are outstanding, although analysts expect the net payout to end up at only $3.2 billion or so.