Pink picks

Comment, analysis and other offerings from Thursday’s FT,

John Gapper: Charge for news or bleed red ink
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, spoke bluntly last week when he described the financial effects of the internet on his newspaper to journalism students in Coventry: “If I stop to think about the business model, it is sometimes quite scary.” Scary indeed, writes the FT’s Gapper.

David Pilling: Reason v emotion in China’s growth story
This year, the consensus is for China to grow even faster than last year as exports pick up and record investment continues, says the FT’s Pilling. Yet there are more than a few dissenters who warn that the seemingly solid Chinese economy is sooner or later bound to melt. Are they right?

Insight: Jonathan Garner – Lessons to learn from emerging market success
At Morgan Stanley, we estimate that emerging market economies will grow their GDP by 6.5 per cent in 2010 against just 2 per cent for the advanced economies, writes Garner, the bank’s managing director and chief Asian and emerging market strategist. But that is not the reason we expect further outperformance of emerging equity markets.

Will Hutton and Phillip Blond: Review the sell-off of great British companies
The odds of Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft’s chief executive, joining Jerry Levin, head of Time Warner, and eventually apologising for the Cadbury deal – as Levin did for his disastrous takeover of AOL – are high. Kraft is paying £2bn more than planned and up to £4bn more in debt, write Hutton, executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation, and Blond, director of ResPublica. So why do it?

News analysis: US Treasury buyers move the goalposts
The dealers that dominate the US Treasury market had rarely seen anything like it. Last week there was a surge in the number of investors who bypassed them entirely and bought large chunks of Treasuries directly in the US government’s debt auctions. It raised the question of whether the rules of engagement between the dealers and domestic institutional investors are changing in a way that has distinctly unpleasant implications for the dealers.

The Short View: Obama and markets
The stock market, Barack Obama said last March, was “sort of like a tracking poll in politics”. He said he should not spend his time worrying about it as he would probably “get the long-term strategy wrong”. At the time, the sickening 20 per cent fall in the S&P 500 in his first six weeks in office was held up by rival politicians as the market’s negative judgment on his presidency. Since then, the investor class has had nothing to complain about, writes the FT’s John Authers.

Westminster: MPs’ bluster against the City
Nick Clegg attracted some mocking laughter from MPs – including Gordon Brown – during Prime Minister’s Questions today for daring to question the Cadbury’s takeover. How come the government couldn’t stop RBS, which is state-owned, from part-funding the Kraft takeover, he asked?

Lex on insurers
As speculation mounted on Tuesday morning that Martha Coakley would fail to secure the Democrats’ 60-seat lock on the US Senate, companies whose futures hinge on a pending healthcare overhaul saw their share prices gyrate.

Analysis: Technology – A world to scale
Long acknowledged as a leader in innovation, Britain is struggling to realise the sector’s full economic potential – a problem for government as it seeks a route out of the crisis.