Miller Tabak said the drop in sales was less than expected.
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Zimmer Holdings Announces a Dividend and Buyback Program
" DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Zimmer Holdings Inc. (ZMH) initiated a quarterly dividend and authorized a new stock repurchase program as the maker of orthopaedic products joins a growing list of companies looking to return value to shareholders.
The company declared an initial quarterly dividend of 18 cents, which will cost about $129 million a year.
Zimmer will also buyback up to $1.5 billion of stock through Dec. 31, 2014 under a new plan that replaces its prior program authorized through Dec.31, 2013.
Moody’s Investors Service said earlier this month that U.S. medical products and device makers were likely to pursue stock buybacks, dividends and acquisitions to satisfy shareholders and spur growth as demand remains soft and pricing pressure intensifies.
Zimmer in October reported its third-quarter profit rose slightly, though increases in its hip and knee products outside the U.S. contributed to 6.9% revenue growth.
Shares were trading at $48.80, up 2.7%.
-By Melodie Warner, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2283; [email protected]
(END) Dow Jones Newswires”
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According to North Korean state teevee.
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The fucker was 69.
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Commentary: An Ancient Snobbery Towards Commerce Remains
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ON CHRISTMAS DAY, millions of Britons will gather around the television to watch “Downton Abbey”, a nostalgic soap opera set in the days of country houses and dignified butlers. Back then, gentlemen cultivated the land (and occasionally went to war); they did not run a business, a task far beneath their station. In living memory, some middle-class Britons would not allow delivery boys to come to their front door; the tradesmen’s entrance was at the side.
This sniffy attitude towards commerce was not confined to Britain, nor did it die out with liveried footmen and debutante balls. Aristocrats across Europe were equally suspicious of the nouveaux riches. And their modern descendants, the middle-class intelligentsia who populate the continent’s universities and staff its public sector, have a tendency to despise the businesspeople who generate the wealth needed to fund their way of living. There is great distaste at the idea that political choices should be dictated by “the markets”; investors should just hand over their money and not ask whether it will be paid back.
French politicians will defend to the death the agricultural subsidies granted to their farmers. After all, the farmers comprise la France profonde, the heartland of villages and vineyards. But the same politicians are withering about the idea that David Cameron, the British prime minister, might relegate Britain to the fringes of Europe in order to protect the country’s financial-services industry.
One can see a similar attitude in the debate about Germany’s role in creating the current euro-mess. Who are these Germans, with their work ethic, their competitive industrial sector and their success in exporting to Asia? Other Europeans may regard Germany with grudging admiration, but they see it less as an example to be copied than as a tiresome nag, forever blathering about fiscal probity. Let the Germans soil their hands with trade while the rest of us live off the prosperity it brings.
Perhaps these attitudes go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Their elites had slaves to attend to their needs. Their lives were not idle, but the path to respectability was through military service or farming, rather than trade. However, it was the merchants bringing the grain from north Africa to Rome who kept the empire fed.
These attitudes persisted through the Middle Ages, when moneylending was a despised activity to be left to minorities like the Jews; sovereign risk in those days was the danger that the king would imprison or execute his creditors to avoid repayment. When mankind began to escape the Malthusian trap of subsistence living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the attitude towards the new industries was one of disgust for the “dark, Satanic mills”.
Admittedly, manufacturing is now seen in a rather more positive light. A far smaller part of the economy, it is bathed in nostalgia: real men making real things. Once a job on a production line was a soul-destroying drudge; nowadays that label has fallen on service-sector jobs in call centres and fast-food restaurants.
Apart from technology, the three most successful industries of the past 50 years have been finance, pharmaceuticals and energy. Look at the way those sectors are portrayed in films and in TV dramas and the same attitudes prevail. Financiers are unthinking brutes, whose obsession with numbers is a form of autism. Multinational drug companies are vast conspiracies selling products with fat margins and hiding their deadly side-effects. Energy companies are despoiling the planet.
All these industries are, of course, legitimate subjects for criticism. But such lofty attitudes towards commerce are easy to adopt in a relatively rich society, in which few have to worry where the next meal is coming from. Europeans have had a pretty privileged existence over the past half-century or so, riding on the back of America’s global dominance. But the economic power is shifting towards Asia, a region where many people are prepared to work hard to get ahead and business isn’t always a dirty word.
Eventually, the great estates like Downton Abbey fell into decay. The cost of maintenance soared while death duties depleted the owners’ capital; the servants found better-paying jobs in manufacturing. The aristocrats were forced to discover a head for business, turning their estates into safari parks and their conservatories into tea shops. As their populations age and their relative economic weight declines, Europeans may need a similar change in attitude towards the sordid business of earning a national living.
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High Stakes Final GOP Debate Before Iowa
It’s been 32 weeks since the first Republican presidential debate. Since then, a changing cast of contenders has faced off a dozen times across the country with millions watching at home.
Of the original combatants from that May 5 meeting in Greenville, S.C., only two, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, remain. There have been four lead changes in national polls, two candidates drop out, four candidates join the field and billions of pixels poured out by reporters and pundits trying to make sense of it all.
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Gasparino: Morgan Stanley Layoffs Coming $MS
Morgan Stanley (MS: 15.23, +0.17, +1.13%) finally threw in the towel.
After months of denying that the big Wall Street investment bank had plans to announce across-the-board job cuts if business conditions didn’t improve, the firm announced Thursday morning that it will slash about 1,600 jobs, or a little more than 2% of its total workforce.
In July the FOX Business Network was first to report that Morgan was drawing up plans to slash jobs beyond the previously announced cuts of about 300 brokers from its “retail” division — which sells stocks and other securities to individual investors — if business conditions deteriorated. Morgan has the largest retail sales force with about 18,000 brokers.
The FOX Business report was initially denied by press officials at the firm as fear spread among bankers and traders that slowing business conditions were likely to be addressed through job cuts. Adding to the confusion: shares fluctuated wildly over the summer as investors speculated that Morgan was holding sovereign debt and other securities tied to several troubled European countries.
Morgan continues to deny that it has significant exposure to Europe, though today the firm finally confirmed its job cutting plans.
“As we conduct our year-end performance management process and evaluate the right size of the franchise for 2012, we anticipate the elimination of approximately 1,600 positions across the firm globally impacting all job levels — to take place early in the first quarter of 2012,” the firm said in a statement.
Shares of Morgan have fallen more than 40% this year; they rose a little less than 1% on the news.
Morgan isn’t the only firm to announce cutbacks as stiffer regulations and a slowing business environment crimp Wall Street profits. Nearly every major firm is paring back staff, including Morgan’s arch rival, Goldman Sachs (GS: 92.93, -0.32, -0.34%).
Morgan CEO James Gorman has already announced that executives at his firm should expect much smaller bonuses this year, with some receiving no bonus at all.
“The government constraints put on this industry in terms of earning money has never been seen in any other industry,” said securities analyst Dick Bove. “And the result is they have to fire people. This isn’t specific or unique to Morgan Stanley.”
What makes Morgan’s situation unusual is the amount of confusion surrounding the job cuts, and the contingency plans that were in place. Some analysts have speculated that the firm didn’t want to concede it was likely to cut its staff so as not to give credibility to fears it may face losses tied to Europe.
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