With talk about a multibillion-dollar deal to sell NBC Universal to Comcast burbling away, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt popped the top on a $250 million venture fund designed to buy stakes in small healthcare technology companies.

“What we’re trying to do is embrace the venture community, try and do a series of early-stage and later-stage type investments,” Immelt said in an interview. “We don’t do everything inside our four walls.”

Competing venture capitalists might consider Immelt’s embrace more of a bear hug. GE is taking a similar approach to the energy industry. It has a stake in A123 Systems, the battery maker that was one of the best-received initial public offerings of the year. Scott Malone, our reporter who interviewed Immelt, notes that taking stakes in smaller companies rather than buying them outright gives GE more flexibility. It gains exposure to a wider array of technologies, any one of which could take off.

“GE is in the midst of a $6 billion drive to revamp its healthcare arm, called ‘Healthymagination,’ that includes rolling out products intended to help hospitals and other health providers cut costs and making investments to encourage the adoption of electronic medical records,” Malone reports.

Might be just cosmetic, but a new name would be a good place to start.

Speaking in New Delhi, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt said “Discussions are ongoing whether it is an IPO or another partnership,” in response to a question on whether GE was talking to Comcast to sell a stake in the fourth-placed TV network and movie studio. With Vivendi possibly just a couple weeks away from unloading its 20 percent stake in the NBC venture, and all the talk this week about Comcast gathering coins to add the content trove to its cable mix, it might seem as if Immelt is trying to conjure something like a rabbit from a hat – or a peacock from a beret.

GE and Comcast are discussing a deal under which the largest U.S. cable firm would take control of 51 percent of NBC Universal with GE, which has the right of first refusal to pick up Vivendi’s stake if the French company exercises its annual option to sell, taking the rest. “The capital markets have definitely improved,” Immelt said. There is reason to see stability and some optimism for the future,” he said.

Set aside for a moment that the sickly advertising market that NBC already faces. The market for IPOs is picking up nicely right now, but is still in an early stage of recovery, making do with a ragtag bunch of real estate investment trusts and Chinese new-market plays. What effect do you think a big media play splashing into that pool would have on investor demand for new issues?

If you needed a sign that banks are becoming more confident on the finance biz, take a look at what analysts are saying about General Electric this morning. The clouds that have hung over the industrial conglomerate’s finance arm through the financial crisis, are starting to break up, say Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. GE’s stock put on 4 percent on the comments before the market opened.

With support seen waning for regulatory reforms that would require such GE to dump its finance arm, Goldman boosted the bank’s rating on the GE stock to a “buy” from “neutral”. Deutsche was also upbeat. Both noted that allowing GE to keep the business would give it more strategic flexibility and Goldman had estimated that a forced break-up could cost GE equity holders $40 billion.

GE Capital is the biggest drag on the company, which is trying to wind the unit back to represent no more than 30 percent of earnings, down from half before the crisis. There is little doubt that government intervention elsewhere has been bitter medicine, even if it was seen as necessary to sustaining the financial system. Signs that politicians are releasing their supportive stranglehold on the sector, such as allowing TARP paybacks, are likely to be pointed to as signs of a broader recovery.

U.S. Securities regulators on Thursday sued a well-connected Kuwaiti financier, saying he reaped millions in suspicious profits after false takeover reports briefly sent shares of Harman International Industries soaring this week.

Reuters reporter Ransdell Pierson was in the office working the Sunday shift when he received a fax with the purported takeover offer.  Unable to verify the authenticity of the fax, Reuters did not publish the story.  Here is Ransdell’s first person account of what happened, and a copy of the fax. Would you have questioned its veracity?

Ransdell Pierson:

I was scouring newspapers on a Sunday shift in the Reuters New York bureau and waiting for news about distressed lender CIT Group, when the phone finally rang and broke my reverie. “Newsroom,” I said, and the caller replied, “Your Jeddah bureau is closed today. Can I send you a fax?” The male caller, who I imagined to be a middle-aged office aide frustrated by the thankless chore of delivering his fax, said it was a press release about a deal. Something about one company buying another for about $3 billion.
“If it’s such a big transaction, shouldn’t this news be coming over the PRNewswire or BusinessWire?” I asked him. He explained that it was the weekend, so faxing a press release was the best route.
I gave him a fax number and he called back, irritated the document hadn’t gone through. I gave him another fax number and he soon called back again, more irritated than before. So I gave him the number of a third Reuters fax machine, but told him that it needed to include contact information for all the parties. “Otherwise, we can’t authenticate it.” “OK, you’ll have it,” he replied.

But when the single-sheet document arrived seconds later, it was bereft of any contact info.
Topped by a legitimate-looking APG logo [standing for Arabian Peninsula Group] , it described an offer by the group to buy U.S. stereo equipment maker Harman International Industries. It was plausibly well written, so I did not dismiss it out of hand. But I was skeptical.

Finding no references to the Arabian group in the Reuters databases or Google, and unable to reach any Harman officials for verification, I was glad I hadn’t sent any headlines out about the “deal” on the Reuters wire.

I followed up by calling my editor at home and telling him about the calls, and the fax. He said the 100 percent premium for Harman, in this economy, seemed outlandish. “I’m sure it’s a hoax.”
Even so, the last thing I did that night, after going home, was to do one last Google search — to see if any other news organizations had carried the “news.” The headline from the press release did appear on one or two websites, but not on any major news organizations. I slept well.

Energy M&A has heated up over the past few weeks, with two large deals possibly on the horizon: the sale of Repsol’s Argentine unit YPF as well as Kosmos Energy’s stake in the Jubilee oil field in Ghana.

If thise deals would happen, it would follow Suncor Energy’s $20 billion takeover of rival Petro Canada, announced earlier this year.

So is M&A in the oil sector heating up? Maybe, but insiders warn that the fluctuations in oil and gas prices could slow the flow of deals.

Historically,  crude oil has tended to trade between 9 to 11 times natural gas prices.  But with crude at around $60 a barrel and natural gas at around $3.35 per million british thermal units, that ratio is currently 18 times natural gas prices.

That suggests gas prices will go up or crude prices will go down. If oil prices drop, then assets that on the market could be pulled, and the M&A market could cool fast.

General Electric Co Chief Executive Jeff Immelt went to Michigan, the bleeding heart of the U.S. industrial heartland, on Friday to call for a resurgence in American manufacturing.
But even as he warned against relying too heavily on the financial industry to drive economic growth, he subtly set up a defense of the largest U.S. conglomerate’s hefty finance arm.

Analysts and investors are worried that the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of U.S. financial regulations could force GE to spin off GE Capital, which has businesses ranging from leasing jet planes to investing in commercial real estate.

“We also need a financial system that is built around helping industrial companies to succeed,” Immelt told the Detroit Economic Club. “GE is an important part of this financial services approach. We plan to focus GE Capital on financing small- and medium-sized customers in industries that we know the best.”

He said that after first contending that the U.S. had come to rely too much on Wall Street wizardry and consumers who spend more than they earn to drive prosperity. Disparities in pay reflect that imbalance, he said.

“You know something is wrong when a mortgage broker is pulling down $5 million a year while a Ph.D. chemist is earning $100,000,” Immelt said.

Immelt did not directly address the proposal on Thursday. But earlier this week, he told GE employees that the largest U.S. conglomerate would fight any effort to force it to separate GE Capital from its industrial core.

Several analysts this week warned that the administration’s current proposal, which would prevent large financial institutions from having nonfinancial operations, would likely require such a separation. However, they pointed out that even the current proposal — which would be subject to negotiation in Congress — allows a five-year grace period.

“The government is unlikely to do anything to cause major disruptions to a huge company like GE until the market recovers significantly, especially since GE has not been blamed for any problems in the financial system,” wrote BernsteinResearch analyst Steven Winoker, in a note to clients.

“Be kind in your article. I read this morning I wasn’t going to get the deal across,” said Agrium CEO Mike Wilson, referring to an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail about his company’s hostile bid for rival fertilizer maker CF Industries. “What the hell is that?”

Speaking on the sidelines of a BMO Capital Management agriculture, protein & fertilizer conference,  Wilson said he was frustrated by CF’s unwillingness to discuss his company’s bid, but “frustration won’t make us go away.”

Agrium bumped its cash-and-stock bid for CF to around $85 a share on Monday, increasing its previous bid more than 6 percent.

“At $85, I can’t believe (CF CEO Steve WIlson is) not going to come to us and say let’s talk,” Agrium’s Wilson said. “I’d be amazed.”

One intriguing remark that Blackstone COO Tony James let slip on today’s earnings call is that it could be gearing up to sell an energy asset. 
James explained that while opportunities to exit investments weren’t numerous, it had succeeded making a profit on the sale of pharmaceutical company Stiefel. 
“We have another company in our portfolio… in the energy sector, which had some very, very exciting results finding unbelievable amounts of hydrocarbons and… that might be something we’d look to exit,” James said on a call to the media. 
He didn’t identify the company so we’re doing the guessing ourselves — out of the current energy investments Blackstone lists on its website, we reckon Kosmos Energy, which has a significant oil field in Ghana, could fit the bill.

(Additional reporting by Mike Erman)

PepsiCo Inc’s offers to buy the remaining stakes in its two largest bottlers came as a surprise, but the biggest surprise may be the scant 17.1 percent premium in the overtures.
    
PepsiCo’s bid to buy the rest of the bottlers it does not already own constitutes a so-called “squeeze-out,” or a transaction in which the buyer already owned some portion of the target and was seeking to own the 100 percent.
    
Even given that squeeze-out premiums are typically lower than cases where a buyer did not own any part of the target and was seeking to acquire 100 percent, this one looks particularly low, according to FactSet Mergerstat.
    
The average 1-day premium for a squeeze-out deal was 35.77 percent versus the average 1-day premium of 44.10 percent for a full acquisition, FactSet Mergerstat said.
    
Put another way, the PepsiCo premium was half the normal premium for a typical squeeze-out. Both Pepsi Bottling Group and PepsiAmericas rose above PepsiCo’s offer, suggesting that shareholders expect the deal to get a little sweeter.

First Reserve is sitting on another $9 billion of spending money for energy deals after finishing raising its latest buyout fund, Fund XII. The private equity giant, which specialises in energy investments, said the fund is the largest ever raised in the energy sector and exceeds its previous fund, Fund XI, which raised $7.8 billion in 2006. 

The fund appears to be lower than target, however. London-based private equity intelligence firm Preqin said in a recent report that the fund had a $12 billion target.

“Energy remains a large, dynamic and complex industry where change creates new, attractive investment opportunities,” said William Macaulay, Chief Executive Officer of First Reserve in the press release (below).

Private equity firms have been struggling to raise new money for funds as the pension and endowment funds that invest in them have been hit by slides in the equity markets.

Some sectors and funds have been more successful than others. Secondary firms, which typically buy investors’ positions in buyout funds at a discount, have been particularly successful at raising capital.

Fund XII Final