Harold Maass of The Week The Best of Today's Business

NEWS AT A GLANCE

MillerCoors lands on Chicago

MillerCoors LLC, the new joint U.S. venture of beer giants SABMiller and Molson Coors Brewing, selected Chicago as its headquarters. Chicago was a compromise for Milwaukee-based Miller and Golden, Colo.-based Coors, who started life as a combined entity July 1. (Chicago Sun-Times) Chicago beat out suburban Dallas, after pledging $20 million in state and city subsidies. In return, Chicago gets 300-400 high-paying white-collar jobs. (Chicago Tribune) MillerCoors will also invest $100 million to upgrade the Coors plant in Golden so it can produce a wider range of brews and other products. MillerCoors was formed to better compete with Anheuser-Busch. (The Denver Post)

Tire maker Continental rejects $17.8 billion takeover bid

Germany's Continental AG, the No. 2 European tire maker, rejected an unsolicited $17.8 billion takeover offer from ball-bearing firm Schaeffler Group. Continental called the offer too low and possibly illegal, and criticized it as lacking any "strategic rationale" and as bad for Continental shareholders. Continental is about three times the size of family-owned Schaeffler. (Reuters) The offer is 29 percent higher than Continental's share price on July 11, before word of the possible acquisition surfaced. Schaeffler said it already controls about 36 percent of the firm's voting rights. (Bloomberg)

Intel beats expectations

Top computer chip maker Intel reported a 25 percent jump in quarterly profit, to $1.6 billion, handily beating Wall Street expectations. The growth was fueled by strong global demand for chips, especially for laptops; Intel said demand will continue in the current quarter. (The New York Times) The strong results allayed concerns about Intel and the broader tech sector. "Intel has product momentum now, widening the gap with competitors," said analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies. (MarketWatch) On that note, European regulators are preparing new antitrust charges, The Wall Street Journal reported, alleging that Intel enticed European retailers to shun PCs with chips by Intel rival AMD. (Reuters)

It's an Olympics party, and CEOs line up

More than 1,000 CEOs are expected to attend the Beijing Olympics next month, and they're going for more than the games. As booming China celebrates its biggest international event yet, the corporate bigwigs whose companies do business there -- or want to -- see the Olympics as a can't-miss event. And China's rolling out the red carpet, as much as it can -- cooled sky boxes are full, limos are all booked, there aren't enough front row seats at key events. Still, "for those who wish to be important in business in China for the next 20 years, people in China will ask you if you were here during the Olympics," says Beijing-based businessman Matt Estes. "And if your answer is 'No,' they'll ask, 'Why?'" (The Wall Street Journal)

BEST COLUMNS OF THE DAY

The opaque global economy

"The good that globalization has done is hard to dispute," says Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post, but it has a dangerous Achilles' heel: a "disorderly global economy" could undo most of that good. Financial crises, "interruptions of crucial supplies (oil, obviously)," brutal trade wars, and violent business cycles show how complex our interconnected global economy can be. And CEOs and economists are as baffled by it as you are. What seems clear is that after years as "the world's economic locomotive," the U.S., and the dollar, are losing influence. That could be very good . . . or not. We can't undo globalization, but hopefully we'll start to understand it better.

The globalization of the middle class

With all the "widespread gloom and doom in the West," says Jim O’Neill in the Financial Times, it's easy to lose sight of a "startlingly positive" phenomenon in the global economy -- "We are in the middle of an explosion of the world's middle class." According to a Goldman Sachs study, 70 million people a year are entering that wealth group, defined as earning $6,000 to $30,000 a year. Brazil, Russia, India, and China are leading this charge, but it's broader than that. And yes, it will change the balance of economic power. But "it is important for everyone in the so-called developed world to be constantly aware that these powerful shifts in global wealth are good not only for the developing world, but for them too."

GOOD DAY FOR: Short sellers, after the Strunk Short index jumped 10.47 percent in June, signalling the best month since March 2001 for betting against the market. The index rose 19.34 percent in the first half of 2008. (MarketWatch)

BAD DAY FOR: Meritocracy, after new immigration rules in Britain designed to attract only highly skilled workers would exclude the founders of Microsoft, Apple, and Dell, and other entrepreneurs because they don't have a college degree. If you're a 22-year-old American with a bachelor's degree and a $52,000 salary, says Sophie Barrett-Brown at the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, "you can come in, but Bill Gates can't." (Bloomberg)

NOTED: Mining firm Cleveland-Cliffs, North America's largest producer of iron pellets, agreed to buy Appalachian coal producer Alpha Natural Resources for $10 billion. The combined company, Cliffs Natural Resources, will own nine iron ore plants and more than 60 coal mines in the Americas and Australia. Cleveland-Cliffs said the deal will help it compete in providing raw materials to the booming global steel industry. (Bloomberg)

This column was written by Peter Weber and edited by Harold Maass of TheWeekDaily.com.