John Thain says he put shareholders first and his interests second in deciding to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America.

Thain, speaking at the Reuters Global Finance Summit in New York, said a deal to sell a partial stake in Merrill Lynch to Goldman Sachs would have been better for him, but the sale of the entire Wall Street firm to Bank of America was the best outcome for shareholders.

Over a fateful weekend in September 2008, as Lehman hurtled toward bankruptcy, AIG floundered and the financial system looked into the abyss, Merrill held discussions with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for various transactions, Thain said.

Initial discussions with Bank of America involved either the sale of the entire company or a 9.9 percent stake and a multibillion credit line, the former Merrill CEO said.

With Goldman, discussions only involved the stake sale and the credit line. Discussions with Morgan Stanley about a strategic transaction were brief, he said.

“When Bank of America offered $29 a share on Sunday afternoon, it was clear to me that was the best thing for our shareholders,” Thain said. 

Thain was fired by Bank of America soon after the deal closed, and is now considering a career in private equity and other jobs. 

“The risk to the shareholders, the risk to the company that a 9.9 percent stake and a multibillion dollar credit facility might not be enough was much too high,” Thain said. “Now, for me personally, it might have been better. But my job was to protect the shareholders.”

Takeo Sumino, chief operating officer of Nomura Holding America Inc, wants to make one thing clear: neither he nor his Tokyo colleagues are into the habit of breaking into song first thing in the morning at the office.

A Wall Street Journal story in July said that one group of Nomura traders sang a company song in morning meetings.

“Japan created the video game, Japan has created the karaoke culture, but that does not necessarily mean that Nomura as a company will ask people to sing a song every day,” he said, trying to debunk reports of culture clashes between Nomura bankers and their new colleagues at the former Lehman Brothers empire in Asia and Europe.

“I worked in Nomura for 22 years. I never sang a song in the morning,” he said. “If you want to sing a song or listen to my song I can take you to karaoke, but you don’t need to come to my office because I don’t sing a song.”

Sumino acknowledges that the Lehman deal has changed things at Nomura, but insists it's been in positive ways.

Bankers who could only communicate in Japanese are now rattling off e-mails and water cooler conversations in English, he told the Reuters Global Finance Summit.

“I do think a very big transition, a transformational change took place in Nomura after we started working with Lehman,” Sumino said.

“E-mail traffic in English . . . . is tremendously larger,” he said. “The number of individuals in Tokyo who used to be able to operate only speaking in Japanese, a lot of them are now communicating and writing and speaking in English.”

Swine flu is turning out to be a sales bonanza for drug companies - just don’t call it a windfall, says GlaxoSmithKline.

As one of the world’s top suppliers of both vaccines and antiviral medicine, CEO Andrew Witty resents the implication that billions of dollars of business simply fell into his company’s lap when the World Health Organisation declared H1N1 a pandemic in June.

“For me the word windfall means you’re walking down the street and something fell out of the sky,” he told the Reuters Health Summit. “We’ve spent the best part of 15 years investing for this situation and our ability to manufacture and supply potentially 500 million or so doses (of vaccine) is all because of these investments.”

U.S. healthcare reform is top of everybody’s agenda right now — but Barack Obama isn’t the only government leader chasing a new deal.

“If you are talking healthcare reform, it’s our daily life in Europe,” Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Sorensen told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.

“Prices are being impacted, there is parallel trade — all kinds of tricks that are aimed at reducing cost. Europe is very anemic at the moment.”

European governments have been pushing back against rising healthcare bills for years with a range of measures including price cuts, and ballooning budget deficits in the wake of the financial crisis are not helping one bit.

Have healthcare companies sunk as far as controversial tobacco companies in the public eye? One medical equipment maker thinks so.

Makers of medical tests, implants and other devices face anywhere from $2 billion-a-year in industry-wide taxes in the House of Representatives’ health reform bill passed on Saturday to $4 billion-a-year under a Senate version.
The Senate measure’s tax is not deductible and would be applied much like the tobacco settlement from cigarette makers years ago, said Beckman Coulter CEO Scott Garrett.

“That hurts, that stings to be treated like the tobacco industry,” he told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.

It could hurt customers — hospitals, patients and others — too. Companies have said they would have pass along any higher costs from the tax directly onto users.

Garrett, whose company makes clinical diagnostic tests as well as other research instruments, said he was “rooting for the House version,” which is tax deductible and phases in the charges starting in 2013.

A few years ago, there was a book out called “Tuesdays with Morrie.” At Reuters, though, we spend our Tuesday mornings during Auto Summits with Ron.

It wouldn’t be a Reuters Autos Summit without our yearly visit from United Auto Workers head Ron Gettelfinger … at the crack of dawn.

Gettelfinger is not one to loaf around and show up at our summit at a leisurely hour of, say, sometime after the sun rises. Oh no. Gettelfinger was scheduled to kick off our Tuesday slate of guests at 7:00 am. But by now we know better.

In fact, when coming into the building this morning sometime after 6:00 am, Gettelfinger was already in the lobby of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce building doing a radio call-in program on his cell phone.

The sun would rise shortly thereafter.

But despite the hour, Gettelfinger is always an interesting person to interview, as he has his eye on all parts of the autos industry. And he didn’t disappoint this year, either.

After a year like this has been, there is a tendency to want to sit back a little and let all of the seismic events sink in. But Gettelfinger sees the real challenges to the autos industry to be down the road.

 (Click here to hear Ron Gettelfinger’s comments)

New technologies, new hiring patterns and new financings will all be the order of the day for the next 10 years. So while this has been a rough-and-tumble year, the fun hasn’t ended yet, he suspects.

The Reuters Autos Summit runs through Thursday in Detroit and Paris and features a global slate of guests from the big manufacturers, dealers and suppliers.

The U.S. auto industry has had one heck of a year.

Sales have fallen off, credit has been pretty much nonexistant and two of the major U.S. automakers were bankrupt. Other that all that, things were fine.

But Bill Diehl, chief executive of advisory firm BBK, said at the first day of this year’s Reuters Autos Summit, that one of the main concerns for 2010 (if it’s not THE main concern) is the industry’s overall exposure to commercial real estate.

We have been hearing about the problems with commercial real estate in many other sectors of the U.S. economy and Diehl gave the strongest statement so far about the auto side.

(To hear Diehl\’s comments, please click here)

The Reuters Autos Summit continues through Thursday in Detroit and Paris.

A few years ago, one of the guests at our annual Reuters Autos Summit — Tom Stallkamp from Ripplewood — pretty much stopped everyone dead in their tracks by predicting that auto sales in the United States was likely to fall to an obscenely low level of 14.5 million.

Those were the days.

Of course, Stallkamp was making that prediction at a time when U.S. car manufacturers were selling in the neighborhood of 16 to 17 million a year. If the number hits 14.5 million in 2010, people will be wild with enthusiasm as most now expect something in a range of 10 to 11 million.

That would be about flat to a little higher than sales this year.

On the first day of Reuters annual sojourn to Detroit for the Reuters Autos Summit, defining what the “new normal” is going to be for everything about the auto industry is much on everyone’s mind. What will happen with the big manufacturers, the dealerships, the suppliers.

It’s a lot to assess all at once.

Bob Carter, head of Toyota’s U.S. operations kicked things off for the summit by talking about what he sees for the coming year.

The Reuters Autos Summit runs through Thursday in Detroit and Paris. For an audio clip of Carter’s comments, please click this link (Toyota’s Bob Carter at the Reuters Autos Summit).

After a year of unprecedented turmoil in the auto industry, BMW’s U.S. head smells blood in the water.

Changes in ownership at some of its historic European rivals may present the German luxury automaker with a chance to grab market share. 

But even as Jim O’Donnell saw weaknesses to exploit, he raised the worry that one of Detroit’s most storied car brands, Cadillac, could take out of the market of the company that calls its vehicles “the ultimate driving machine.” 

As Cadillac’s parent company, General Motors Corp, went through a bankruptcy that forced it to cut thousands of jobs and shed brands, BMW picked up Cadillac customers and dealers. But a slimmed down GM could present a renewed threat, said the president of BMW’s North American unit. 

“Going forward, I actually see Cadillac as one that could be potentially a serious rival,” O’Donnell told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit. “Now that GM is only going to concentrate on four brands, if I was at GM, I would concentrate on Cadillac and really try and reestablish it. But if you look at the last year, and no wonder because of the turmoil in the marketplace, has been losing sales quicker than the market.”

Even as he sees a renewed threat from Detroit, O’Donnell said he thought European rivals could become more vulnerable. BMW sees a chance to snatch customers from Saab — which GM aims to sell to Swedish luxury car maker Koenigsegg — and Volvo — which Ford is negotiation to sell to Chinese automaker Geely. 

“Where are all the Saab customers going to go? And there’s a great deal of uncertainty over Volvo. Where are all the Volvo customers going to go? Even though they’ve done well these last three months, I still think as they come under the ownership of Geely, will they have the same believe in the brand? I don’t know,” O’Donnell said. “But we will try to exploit it.”

When General Motors rolled out its new “May the Best Car Win” ad campaign this fall, it turned its competitive fire on Toyota Motor Corp, rather than one of its Detroit competitors. 
Toyota, which last year displaced GM as the world’s largest carmarker, takes the ads — which compare the Chevy Malibu with the Toyota Camry — as something of a compliment. 
“When Ford names Toyota and not Chevrolet and when Chevrolet names Toyota and not Ford, that speaks to some consumers about our position in the market,” Toyota group vice president and general manager Bob Carter told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit. “So it’s not all bad.” 
But the Japanese automaker has no interest in getting drawn into an advertising tit-for-tat similar to Apple Inc’s “Get a Mac” ads, which compare a young, hip actor representing a Macintosh computer with a dowdy middle aged actor playing a PC run by Microsoft’s Windows operating system. 
“We think the most effective way to approach the market is to talk about our products and our brands,” Carter said.