This Bud's for Belgium

I suppose the sale of the Chrysler Building, that Midtown Manhattan landmark on Lexington Avenue, to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund is a foregone conclusion. Nothing to be done. The sheikhs are being cool about it; the American management group (Tishman) will still hold a 25% stake in the building and the Arabs are content, for now, with being "silent partners." I suppose that's a distinction between them and someone like The Donald, who would feel compelled because of his own insecurities to begin throwing his weight around immediately, yelling "You're fired!" at everyone currently working there. The Abu Dhabi folks will bide their time. No rush; they've got all the time, and money, in the world. When oil sells at $135/barrel, and the United States imports 14 million barrels a day, we're floating $1.9 billion per diem to give the countries who want to buy us up the wherewithal to do so. Don't think for a moment they're not grateful. It's astounding, in the sense of proportion, how much time some Americans of a conservative stripe spend worrying about whether Barack Obama is a "Muslim mole" when we are auctioning off our key assets, like the Chrysler Building, to these same countries they fear so much. If the Sunni Arabs of Abu Dhabi want to cooperate with "activist" brethren in launching another attack on some other part of Manhattan, couldn't they simply now use the Chrysler Building as conspiracy headquarters instead of those fetid caves in Afghanistan? Although maybe that's the thinking in selling to them; it's proactive defense. The Muslims now have a stake in the "ownership society" that Bush created. It's just that other countries now own this society.

But that is as nothing compared to the brew-ha-hah (I know you read this site for the clever wordplay; you can get information anywhere) currently brewing (I'm pushing it now) over the pitch by InBev to buy out Anheuser-Busch. Oh, the humanity! InBev is a Belgian holding company which owns the Beck's and Stella Artois brands, but now wants to add Budweiser, Bud Light and Michelob to its (Clydesdale) stable. Belgium? Yep. Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, Hercule Poirot. Belgium. They've got a $64 billion bid up, all cash, to take over the company. Sounds like a lot of money, but look at it from the euro perspective. Not so long ago, when the dollar and the euro were at parity, the price would have been 64 billion euros. Now that the dollar is worth 65% of a euro, on a good day, the Belgians can buy Bud at a steep discount.

Various American players are mobilizing against this buy-out, including the governor of Missouri, where Anheuser-Busch is headquartered. A lot of other American forces, such as the arbitrage departments at hedge funds, are cheering it along, since AB's stock has been surging lately on news of the deal, after years of stagnation. Sales have been flat in recent years, while the price of barley and hops has shot skyward. Americans, maybe needing something stronger these days, have moved on to wine and cocktails, and anyway, that horse piss Budweiser calls beer is just awful. I can't figure out why the Belgians would want it.

Unless it has something to do with its big distributor, Hensley & Co. Could the crafty Poirots over in Brussels have seen the possibility of an opening wedge here? Hensley is headed up by former USC cheerleader and Vicodin addict Cindy McCain (the former Cindy Hensley), whose personal fortune is estimated as at least One Texas Unit ($100 million, or 65 million euros). Hensley & Co. is Budweiser's go-to wholesaler. That's what Cindy's company does, it sells beer for Budweiser. Imagine what a coup that could be for InBev. Their wholesale beer distributor would be the First Lady of the United States of America. Guess who's in the driver's seat of that relationship? I mean sure, a distributor has a list of customers, contracts with supermarket chains, restaurants, 7-11's, trucks, refrigerated warehouses, a network designed to get the swill you manufacture from the vats at AB to the guts of American men watching the Packer-Cowboy game on the Chinese flat-screen. But InBev doesn't need Hensley like Hensley needs the brewer. Under John McCain's much-beloved NAFTA arrangements, InBev could in a trice wipe out the Hensley deal and replace it with a Mexican outfit who could run all that beer out where it needs to go for probably half the price that Hensley pays its Mexicans.

When America's such a bargain, these big foreign outfits can take flyers like these and see how it works out. This Chrysler Building is kind of nice; wonder what they want for the Empire State Building? Budweiser's okay, but I'm a Miller man myself. Oops, our South African competitor already bought them. Well, wait a while. The White House itself might come on the market.