Jim Armitage: There are assets, but a fox can be clumsy

While Donald Trump's trade wars make the United States unpopular in the city, Comcast is helping to repair Anglo-American relations.

The exorbitant price of the Philadelphia-based media giant for Sky brings benefits for everyone, from big investors like Crispin Odey to Sky's 13,000 employees who hold stock (note from Jeremy Corbyn: most companies are already decent

The UK Treasury will also have a chance to take advantage of Comcast's largesse. Jeremy Darroch, director of Sky, and Andrew Griffith, chief financial officer, for respectively 50 and 27 million pounds for their shares, will pay more taxes in the UK than Amazon, Facebook and Netflix combined.

And that, before you include the fee tax for advisers and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which will make millions of Comcast loans the money of the takeover. BAML has also been very busy earning commissions as a broker for the transaction, recovering the shares of Odey and other institutions on behalf of Comcast.

But what will Fox do next? The loser of Saturday's auction is now in the position of holding 39% of a company over which he no longer has any management control.

It's hard to see why this could hold up, although the effective owner of Fox, Disney, can keep it for a while to create problems for Comcast.

What you could call the Awkward Squad approach.

It would not be the first time a TV company would do it, as Darroch knows. In 2006, he bought nearly 20% of ITV only to block a potential merger with NTL that would have posed a threat to Sky.

It is plausible that Disney could use its participation in Sky as a trading currency in the negotiations to persuade Comcast to sell its stake in Hulu, the streaming service that the two companies jointly hold with AT & T. he can simply swallow his pride and see the multibillion-pound bonanza as a highly profitable business. After all, when Disney agreed to buy Fox, the transaction valued Sky's stake at about £ 14 per share; a total of £ 3.28 less than the knockout offer on Saturday. It's a profit of 2.2 billion pounds.

Not a bad wooden spoon, is not it?

Thomas Cook boss wishes he's not there

While the British, Germans and Swedes were in the sun at home instead of heading to the Mediterranean, Thomas Cook suffered a lot. To fill the beds, it was necessary to reduce the prices.

This is the second warning about today's earnings in two months and highlights how risky it is to own shares in a company that depends on the results of a quarter of the year.

Next summer may be cooler in Northern Europe, but it is feared that Cook has so little power to control his own prices. In addition, it is troubling that the new CFO will be leaving several months after his arrival.

Questions must be asked here, both about Peter Fankhauser's business model and about the character judge.