We love the middle market. For all the glamour of big M&A and PE
deals, the middle market is where the action is -- no time more than
now. And middle market, almost by definition, is regional.
As we discovered in our Regional Special Report on four major Midwestern post-Rust Belt cities --
Milwaukee,
Minneapolis,
Chicago and
Cleveland -- each metropolitan area tends to develop its own dealmaking ecosystems: local buyout shops, advisory houses, banks and other lenders, entrepreneurs. These local players -- a few have national reach by now -- have allowed these cities, battered by the onslaught of foreign competition and recession in the early '90s, to begin to rebound. In the central piece of this package, Matt Miller tells how Milwaukee, which saw its manufacturing infrastructure hammered, is now coming back on the back of -- well, manufacturing. Similar stories can be told about Cleveland, Chicago and Minneapolis -- and even Columbus, Ohio, which may be the
restaurant dealmaking capital of America.
Elsewhere in this issue, our quarterly bankruptcy league tables give us an excuse to take the temperature of that business. The result:
It's really hot, as filings rise and firms frantically begin to recruit to handle the load. The issue also has a fascinating story from our antitrust reporter in Washington, Cecile Kohrs Lindell, looking at the
consolidation of meat processing in the U.S., particularly after acquisitions by a Brazilian beef packer JBS SA. That buying spree has left U.S. ranchers fearful that they will become increasingly disadvantaged as they try to sell cattle to an oligoply of meatpackers.
In our columns this week,
Media Maneuvers looks at a BusinessWeek cover that discovers social networking. In
Backstory, Richard Morgan revisits the very strange expectations and demands besetting media dealmaking in a very fluid, changing period.
Hard Times focuses on condo bankruptcies in Florida, and
Rules of the Road tackles the issue of new rules on accounting for in-process R&D, once a hot controversy. -
Robert Teitelman
