Word: conoco
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Wall Street's main concern is the bulging federal deficit, which s $55.6 billion this year and rising. Government borrowing weighs heavily on credit markets already strained by brisk demand for business loans, including the huge sums to finance megabuck corporate mergers like that between Du Pont and Conoco. The Administration has predicted that the deficit will shrink to $42.5 billion in 1982, and disappear altogether by 1984. But those targets are fast slipping away. The Congressional Budget Office forecast last week that the deficit would be $65 billion in 1982 and would total an extra $50 billion...
Nevertheless, synfuel projects often cost $1 billion or more, and some developers are deciding that they are too expensive. Conoco's proposed coal gasification project in Noble County, Ohio, has been stopped because the Reagan Administration refused to subsidize...
That tactic was used two months ago by Canada's Dome Petroleum to acquire a 52.9% interest in Hudson's Bay Oil and Gas, a Canadian firm controlled by Conoco. Stripped of its Canadian holdings, Conoco became a takeover target and wound up being acquired by Du Pont...
Those smaller oil firms can be expected to fight just as hard as Conoco to stay out of the hands of the larger energy companies. Said Bailey last week: "Had Mobil been permitted to acquire Conoco, there would have been other such mergers initiated by the major oil companies. A real threat existed that a large number of oil companies in the middle tier, like Conoco, would have been eliminated." Several of those firms, including Cities Service and Marathon, have already arranged their own lines of bank credit to fight off unfriendly takeover attempts...
...great unknown remaining after the fight for Conoco is the Justice Department's attitude toward a merger between two oil companies. Two weeks ago, Antitrust Chief William Baxter gave the green light to a Du Pont-Conoco deal. Yet, despite heavy pressure from Mobil, he did not express an opinion on a Mobil-Conoco merger. In fact, he appeared to be indicating that he might block it, when he said: "If they think we're generally soft on mergers, they're going to be in for a big surprise." If Mobil, Texaco or another member...