Entertainment-Music-Life

Friday, February 3, 2012

The Next 17 Big Companies That Are At Risk Of Bankruptcy

Caesars Palace Las Vegas

American Airlines, Eastman Kodak, Hostess...

Lots of iconic brands have filed for bankruptcy recently. Some blamed weak consumer demand, others pointed to rising commodity costs and pension demands. In any case, you can count on many more companies to follow suit.

GovernanceMetric's International provided us with a list of companies with the greatest probability of financial distress. We picked out the biggest names.

Caesars Entertainment

Caesars Palace Las Vegas

Arnold C via Wikimedia Commons

Financial distress probability: 7.28%

Total assets: $28.9 billion

Founded: 1937

Caesars Entertainment is the world's largest casino entertainment company.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Clearwire (CLWR)

Financial distress probability: 9.54%

Total assets: $8.8 billion

Founded: 2003

Clearwire, a wireless internet service provider, has seen its stock gain 40% since October when investors feared that the company would default on its debt, reported Reuters. In December, Sprint provided the company with a lifeline by agreeing to pay $1.6 billion to Clearwire in the next four years.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

McClatchy (MNI)

Financial distress probability: 10.16%

Total assets: $3.0 billion

Founded: 1857

McClatchy, the third-largest newspaper company in the US, has seen a significant drop in its advertising revenue this past year. Currently, the company is focused on its digital advertising in order to make up for the losses, reported Reuters.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

AK Steel Holding (AKS:US)

AP Photo

Financial distress probability: 10.98%

Total assets: $4.58 billion

Founded: 1899

AK Steel, formerly Armco, is experiencing some problems with its pension charges and its net loss has doubled since last year, according to a company press realease.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Republic Airway Holdings (RJET)

Flickr/AV8PIX Christopher Ebdon

Financial distress probability: 11.12%

Total assets: $4.2 billion

Founded: 1973

Republic Airways Holdings is an Indiana company that owns Chautauqua Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Republic Airlines and Shuttle America. At the moment, Republic Airways is trying to sell off its troubled asset Frontier, reported Reuters.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Tennessee Valley Authority

John Sevier Combined Cycle Plant

Flickr/TVA eb Team

Financial distress probability: 11.82%

Total assets: $46.39 billion

Founded: 1933

Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides electricity to nine million people in the southeast, needs funds for future projects but cannot afford to take on more dept as its debt ceiling is controlled by the congress. In order to raise funds, TVA has leased the John Sevier Combined Cycle Plant to a group of investors for 30 years at a price of $1 billion, reported Electric Co-op Today.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Office Depot (ODP)

Financial distress probability: 11.90%

Total assets: $4.2 billion

Founded: 1986

Office Depot is a global supplier of office products and services.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Barnes & Noble (BKS)

www.flickr.com

Financial distress probability: 12.05%

Total assets: $4.1 billion

Founded: 1873

Barnes and Noble saw a drop in its stock earlier this month when the company lowered guidance and announced that the company is considering spinning out the Nook business. The simple reason why Barnes and Noble made it while Borders went belly up is the company's investment in Nook and online sales. But can Nook compete with Amazon's Kindle?

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Standard Pacific (SPF)

www.standardpacifichomes.com

Financial distress probability: 13.35%

Total assets: $2.2 billion

Founded: 1965

Standard Pacific, a builder of single-family homes, has taken some hits during the housing crisis and has seen recent downgrades from many banks including from CRT Capital, Raymond James and Compass Point, according to LocalizedUSA.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Dynegy (DYN)

alan5o5 via Flickr

Financial distress probability: 13.93%

Total assets: $11.1 billion

Founded: 1984

Dynegy, a producer and retailer of electric energy, capacity and ancillary services, was sued last year by bondholders who believed they were shortchanged by the company's restructuring. The restructuring was done to try and help Dynegy avoid bankruptcy.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Talbots (TLB)

screenshot www.talbots.com

Financial distress probability: 14.86%

Total assets: $0.7 billion

Founded: 1947

Talbots is actively soliciting bids for a sale after turning down a buyout from Sycamore Partners in December, according to Reuters. UBS recently criticized Talbots for a lack of leadership and brand vision.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

KB Home (KBH)

Flickr/Brough Turner

Financial distress probability: 15.52%

Total assets: $2.7 billion

Founded: 1957

America's fifth-largest homebuilder gave a reason for optimism recently when it announced a surge in orders for new homes, according to Reuters. But until the housing recovery picks up steam, this company remains at risk.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Unites States Postal Service

Daniel Goodman / Business Insider

Financial distress probability: 17.30%

Total assets: $23.4 billion

Founded: 1775

There have been a few suggestion as how to rescue the USPS from bankruptcy. Among them are laying off workers, cutting its Pension fund, cutting Saturday delivery and even selling ads on the side of its trucks, The question that remains is, can USPS do enough to compete with UPS and FedEx?

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Thomas Cook Group (TCG:LN)

Flickr/ell brown

Financial distress probability: 17.94%

Total assets: $10.43 billion

Founded: 2007

Thomas Cook Group, created through the merger of Thomas Cook AG (iconic British travel agency dating as far back as 1841) and My Travel group, has been flirting with bankruptcy for years. In 2009, Arcandor, which owned 52% of the company, filed for bankruptcy, according to the Daily Mail. In November, Prime Minister David Cameron called on banks not to let this "important and iconic British brand" fail, reported the Guardian,

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Air France (AF:FP)

Wikimedia Commons

Financial distress probability: 18.99%

Total assets: $37.1 billion

Founded: 1933

After a number of staff strikes, Air France is currently working on a turnaround plan, reported Reuters, which includes a hiring freeze, a pay freeze and cutbacks to its fleet.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Imperial Sugar (IPSU)

Flickr/David Sledge

Financial distress probability: 20.37%

Total assets: $0.5 billion

Founded: 1843

Imperial sugar, processor and marketer of refined sugar, is expecting to post significant losses for the past year in addition to its 59% drop in stock prices, according to Houston Chronicle. What's more, the company's auditors are questioning the company's ability to stay afloat.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Dendreon (DNDN)

Financial distress probability: 30.62%

Market cap: $0.9 billion

Founded: 1992

After underperforming in sales of its prostate cancer vaccine Provenge, biotechnology company Dendreon saw a 65% drop in stock in August. However, things might be looking up for the company after reporting huge revenue growth in the fourth quarter.

Financial distress probability was calculated by GovernanceMetrics International.

Go visit www.entertainmentmusiclife.com now, is it a cool sight with a lot of tools for creative people to inspire themselves, hone their crafts and market themselves!!!

And don't forget to please buy your copy of "Dying For Her Love "

Don't judge a book by its cover!

This is real life shit!!!

Read The Book...Read The World!

Read it before the scandal hits the airwaves really really soon and it becomes sold out!!

Available in hardcover, softcover and kindle/ebooks

Buy it on Amazon

Buy it on Lulu

Reviews:

ARE YOU SINGLE?! If anyone ever wrote a love letter like this to me I would marry them on the spot. Just goes to show that their still are guys out there that care more about the power of romance than the power of hooking up.

- By Cross ur heart and pinky

"aloha jack ;) reading your book makes me cry & laugh - you're amazing! thank you <3"

-By +kerstin caroline krüger

I JUST READ DYING FOR HER LOVE, VERY PASSIONATE!!

- By Dawn Giggiu

“Great ink! keep slinging that ink!”

- By MELODIC DREAMS

“Cute” -

- By Kenz

Dying For Her Love - Featuring the Following song "Crying Out"

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSX6EDsM3pg&w=420&h=315]

Frtee Download of "Crying Out" or embed it to your site or blog

Crying Out by JackDazey

[soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/jackdazey/04-crying-out"]

Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0 (Love is Love Set)

This album is a sample pre-release that infuses the emotional sound of JackDazey. These few tracks focus on the love songs from the upcoming album "Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0" due out 02/14/2012 along with his book "Dying For Her Love - a love diary". The album in its entirety is an amazing accomplishment in diversity and theme from one accomplished songwriter/producer that can communicate across many genres of music.

"I am that I am - music!!!"

~JackDazey~

Or buy via:

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/1334846" params="showcomments=true&autoplay=false&showplaycount=true&showartwork=true&color=00a5e6" width="100%" height="225" ]

Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0 (Love is Love Set) by JackDazey

Thursday, February 2, 2012

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

'The situation is about as serious and difficult as I've experienced in my career.' Plus, an exclusive interview with IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who issues a dire warning for Europe.

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

VIEW SOURCE

Go visit www.entertainmentmusiclife.com now, is it a cool sight with a lot of tools for creative people to inspire themselves, hone their crafts and market themselves!!!

And don't forget to please buy your copy of "Dying For Her Love "

Don't judge a book by its cover!

This is real life shit!!!

Read The Book...Read The World!

Read it before the scandal hits the airwaves really really soon and it becomes sold out!!

Available in hardcover, softcover and kindle/ebooks

Buy it on Amazon

Buy it on Lulu

Reviews:

- By Cross ur heart and pinky

"aloha jack ;) reading your book makes me cry & laugh - you're amazing! thank you <3"

-By +kerstin caroline krüger

I JUST READ DYING FOR HER LOVE, VERY PASSIONATE!!

- By Dawn Giggiu

“Great ink! keep slinging that ink!”

- By MELODIC DREAMS

“Cute” -

- By Kenz

Dying For Her Love - Featuring the Following song "Crying Out"

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSX6EDsM3pg&w=420&h=315]

Frtee Download of "Crying Out" or embed it to your site or blog

Crying Out by JackDazey

[soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/jackdazey/04-crying-out"]

Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0 (Love is Love Set)

"I am that I am - music!!!"

~JackDazey~

Or buy via:

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/1334846" params="showcomments=true&autoplay=false&showplaycount=true&showartwork=true&color=00a5e6" width="100%" height="225" ]

Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0 (Love is Love Set) by JackDazey

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Don Cornelius, ‘Soul Train’ Creator, Is Dead

Don Cornelius, ‘Soul Train’ Creator, Is Dead

Don Cornelius, the producer and television host who created the dance show “Soul Train,” was found shot dead in his Los Angeles home early Wednesday morning in what appears to be a suicide, the Los Angeles Police Department and the county coroner’s office said. He was 75.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

A person called the police from Mr. Cornelius’s house on Mulholland Drive in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood just before 4 a.m. and reported shots had been fired, a police spokesman, Chris No, said. When officers arrived, they were let into the house and found Mr. Cornelius lying lifeless on the floor with a gunshot wound to the head that appeared to be self-inflicted, said the Los Angeles County assistant chief coroner, Ed Winter.

Mr. Cornelius was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 4:56 a.m., Mr. Winter said. “It was reported as a suicide, a self-inflicted wound,” he said. “I have investigators at the hospital.”

“Soul Train” was one of the longest-running syndicated shows in television history and played a critical role in spreading the music of black America to the world, offering wide exposure to musicians like James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Michael Jackson in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I am shocked and deeply saddened at the sudden passing of my friend, colleague and business partner Don Cornelius,” said Quincy Jones, according to the Associated Press. “Don was a visionary pioneer and a giant in our business. Before MTV, there was ‘Soul Train.’ That will be the great legacy of Don Cornelius. His contributions to television, music and our culture as a whole will never be matched. My heart goes out to Don’s family and loved ones.”

Mr. Cornelius, a former disc jockey, created the show in 1970 in Chicago on WCIU-TV and served as its writer, producer and host. Quickly becoming a success, the show was first broadcast nationally in 1971, beginning a 35-year run.

Besides the performers, the program showcased young dancers who would strut their stuff, laying the groundwork for countless dance programs, including current hits like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” and MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew.” “We had a show that kids gravitated to,” Mr. Cornelius said.

In a 2010 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Cornelius said he was excited about a movie project he was developing about the show. “We’ve been in discussions with several people about getting a movie off the ground. It wouldn’t be the ‘Soul Train’ dance show. It would be more of a biographical look at the project,” he said. “It’s going to be about some of the things that really happened on the show.”

Mr. Cornelius stopped hosting the show in 1993, and “Soul Train” ceased production in 2006. Two years later, he sold the show to MadVision Entertainment.

view source

Go visit www.entertainmentmusiclife.com now, is it a cool sight with a lot of tools for creative people to inspire themselves, hone their crafts and market themselves!!!

And don't forget to please buy your copy of "Dying For Her Love "

Don't judge a book by its cover!

This is real life shit!!!

Read The Book...Read The World!

Read it before the scandal hits the airwaves really really soon and it becomes sold out!!

Available in hardcover, softcover and kindle/ebooks

Buy it on Amazon

Buy it on Lulu

Reviews:

- By Cross ur heart and pinky

"aloha jack ;) reading your book makes me cry & laugh - you're amazing! thank you <3"

-By +kerstin caroline krüger

I JUST READ DYING FOR HER LOVE, VERY PASSIONATE!!

- By Dawn Giggiu

“Great ink! keep slinging that ink!”

- By MELODIC DREAMS

“Cute” -

- By Kenz

Dying For Her Love - Featuring the Following song "Crying Out"

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSX6EDsM3pg&w=420&h=315]

Frtee Download of "Crying Out" or embed it to your site or blog

Crying Out by JackDazey

[soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/jackdazey/04-crying-out"]

Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0 (Love is Love Set)

"I am that I am - music!!!"

~JackDazey~

Or buy via:

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/1334846" params="showcomments=true&autoplay=false&showplaycount=true&showartwork=true&color=00a5e6" width="100%" height="225" ]

Top 40 The JackDazey Project 2.0 (Love is Love Set) by JackDazey