DealZone

Friday’s highlights:

* Giant private equity firm Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) posts better-than-expected earnings on Thursday and says that lending for deals has returned, although exiting investments by IPO has been bumpy.

* Huatai Securities’ (601688.SS) modest gains on debut fell short of expectations after it raised $2.3 billion in China’s largest IPO this year, and could set a trend of lower pricing in upcoming share listings.

* Rob Cox of Reuters Breakingviews says Coca-Cola Chief Executive Muhtar Kent’s strategic about-face with a takeover of Coca-Cola Enterprises’ North American bottling operations “doesn’t mean the decision isn’t financially and strategically sound” — but “Kent looks like a charlatan for so recently dismissing the idea after Pepsi beat him to it”.

For more on these stories, and the rest of the latest deal-related news from Reuters, click here.

Top stories from elsewhere (some external links may require subscriptions):

* General Electric Co is in talks with Spanish Banco Santander to sell its 20.85 percent stake in Turkish lender Garanti Bank, Turkish media reports said. Reuters story here.

* Music company EMI has appointed Peter Williams to the board of one of its holding companies, as its buyout house Terra Firma tries to sort out the loss-making record label’s finances, The Daily Telegraph reports.

* General Motors Co is considering two offers for its Hummer brand after plans to sell it to China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery failed, according to the Wall Street Journal.

* A group of ex- regulators and bankers, led by William Isaac, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp’s former chairman, are planning to raise $1 billion to buy failed lenders in the U.S. southeast, Bloomberg said, citing people with knowledge of the plan.

* And the New York Times says curling, the “slow-poke game, which originated in 16th-century Scotland, has captivated the Type-A world of Wall Street almost by accident.”