Stock markets are wobbling, but £10bn cash bids at fat premiums can still happen

A Swedish firm’s pursuit of the product testing company Intertek suggests investors’ price expectations are yet to be shifted by the Iran warIt was a bad day for the FTSE 100 index on Tuesday – down 1.4% – but the puzzle in many quarters is why share prices haven’t fallen further since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran. The index is still up by a couple of percentage points since new year, which is not a bet most would have made at the time if they had been told an inflationary energy price shock lay around the corner.An absence of Iran-related corporate profits warnings partly explains the relative resilience, even if those usually take a while to arrive. So, too, the fact that the Footsie is overpopulated with overseas earners for whom the US economy, which isn’t suffering Europe’s soaring natural gas prices, matters more than their home market. And higher oil prices obviously help the likes of Shell and BP. Continue reading...