Jennifer Saba

The tourism-related trade gap shows the present strength of the U.S. economy, but is also a long-term vulnerability

Elliott took a position in Starbucks in July and is now in discussions with the company to potentially add fund partner Jesse Cohn as a director.

DirecTV is accusing Disney of forcing the distributor to carry all its 16 channels, regardless of how many people watch them. Disneyland | Image: Unsplash

NEW YORK (Reuters Breakingviews) - Good bettors belly up to the table with an idea of the odds and the risk involved.

Apropos of the company he runs, Bob Iger knows how to tell a tale of adventure. Walt Disney boldly laid out a three-year forecast that details everything from broad earnings growth to profitability projections for its streaming TV services. Although the outlook helped add as much as 10% to its market value, there are some gaping holes in the story.

DirecTV said on Nov. 12 it would terminate its merger with rival satellite pay-TV provider EchoStar's Dish by a Nov. 22 deadline.

A satellite deal is now lost in space. DirecTV ended plans to buy its pay-TV rival after controlling shareholder Charlie Ergen refused to haggle with bondholders. He’ll be stuck with an unwanted pile of debt, creditors are left on shaky ground and sizeable synergies are set to vanish.

Threats of tariffs or banning telecommunications equipment were the easy part. TikTok illustrates what happens when the trade war gets difficult. A U.S. federal court has unambiguously supported the government's assertion that the short-form video app's relationship with Chinese parent ByteDance raises national security concerns. European allies are on guard, too. A looming January deadline is a decisive test.

The advertising industry’s newest target: itself. Omnicom has agreed to buy rival Interpublic for $13 billion in an all-stock deal that would create the world’s largest collection of agencies by revenue. Promised cost savings make the idea stack up financially, but there’s no way to spin the rationale as anything but defensive.

David Zaslav may rejoin the media M&A fray. The Warner Bros Discovery boss is reorganizing his assets into two key divisions, further isolating the media company’s dying TV networks. It comes after rival Comcast announced a full split. Something bigger may be in the offing.