I’m starting to think that Tyson Foods is not very good at predicting demand. First, the company misses earnings after raising more chickens than it could sell. Now, the company says it has too many corporate roles. To solve these issues, the company tasked slaughterhouse workers and HR with the same assignment – reduce headcount.

The lowdown

• 🔪 Tyson Foods will cut 10% of corporate roles, mainly at the senior leader level.

• 👾 Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision is blocked by UK regulator.

• 📉 Samsung profit falls 95% amid a global weakening in demand for semiconductors.

Flex your finance muscle

Credit Suisse’s great quarter

How can it be that in a quarter in which Credit Suisse nearly failed and had to be taken over by rival UBS, the bank was able to report its highest quarterly profit ever?

We can blame a quirk of accounting related to the way that the trading value of a company's bonds is affected by its risk level and what it would take for the bank to repurchase these bonds.

Let's say a company issued $1,000 worth of bonds that were trading at $500 due to the company's perceived riskiness. If the company were to buy back those bonds at the trading value of $500, they would have eliminated the future payment obligation of $1,000 for only $500. This would result in a gain of $500 for the company and recorded as profit on their financial statements. In this case, CS bought back the bonds for $0 – which was controversial.

Read about this quirk in more detail here.

Featured stories

Teck’s failed split is good news for Glencore

Swiss miner Glencore has been lobbying fellow miner Teck Resources’ shareholders to support the unsolicited bid it lobbed last month, offering a 20 percent premium.

Glencore’s proposal was to merge with Teck and then demerge into two companies: a metals and trading business based in Canada, and a giant coal miner listed in New York. Teck has flat out rejected the offer, aiming to pursue its own split. Glencore stated it would not be interested in a deal if Teck did this.

Glencore’s lobbying may have worked. Yesterday, Teck’s plan to split the company was abandoned before it was put to a shareholder resolution – presumably knowing it would fail. Teck has stated that “Glencore's rejected proposals remain a non-starter”, but it does not appear as if Glencore will Teck no for answer.

The content we're consuming today

• NBER: Anatomy of a Run: The Terra Luna Crash.

• FT: KPMG fined £1mn over ‘rudimentary’ failures in TheWorks audit ($).

• Bloomberg: BuzzFeed News Was More Blockbuster Than Netflix ($).

Off-balance sheet items

• NY Times readers have conveniently put together this playlist of 12 Motivating Workout Songs (here is the article ($)). I used it this morning and it’s so effective that I’m going to write to WADA and get them to ban it.

The bottom line