Lol, no. My profession requires me to keep up with all of this.
No, it is literally the opposite. While rising interest rates results in more expensive liquidity for all companies who need/choose to debt financing, the largest and most fundamentally sound companies (think blue chip, and Microsoft is the most blueish of blue chip) are the most insulated against interest rate hikes as they will be granted the most favorable borrowing terms. More importantly, Microsoft is not financing the deal with debt; it is an all cash deal with no related borrowings so rising interest rates has no impact on the cost of the acquisition.
Also no, not every company borrows money to finance operations, many businesses can and do run on 100% equity.
This is pure conspiracy theory bullshit. The idea that regulators will allow/block the deal based on current macroeconomic events as opposed to whether or not it violates antitrust regulations is dumb. Sorry if this sounds harsh but there isn't a nicer way to communicate this.
Btw, should you choose to respond with claims of me coming from a "Sony fanboy/console warrior" perspective, you should know that I fully support the deal in principle and legality. But for you and many others here saying that the deal is a slam dunk or that claims of antitrust concerns are meritless, these sorts of comments are fraught with ignorance.
Nah, don't mean to suggest you are coming at it from a console warrior perspective, just assumed you maybe didn't pay attention as much, so no harm no fuss.
I admit to not knowing what profession you are in, but I would argue my profession in particular uniquely puts me in an excellent position to understand how these factors impact companies like Microsoft, and probably a bit better than you might suspect because the company I'm a regional manager for directly does business with companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Sony, Disney, Intel, Nvidia and a whole host of others. We are even a provider of services to a lot of major game development studios, especially when a new AAA studio is being opened up tied to one of our partners or they're growing for a big project or need to add a new team. It's like Christmas here when that happens. This includes providing various hardware and software network solutions.
They provide us with a list of what they want, but a lot of times we offer them our packages that tend to be more extensive than what they were requesting at a similar price - we are one of the few companies in the business that eat that cost for our customers and have been doing so for years. Ironically, to make this sustainable, many of the below management employees get paid
BETTER than upper management as a result, and they're just fine with that. Philosophy is they pay the people what they're worth and management gladly takes much less to keep company firing on all cylinders. It's a tough policy to replicate for competition because few top execs would ever want to be getting paid much worse than a lot of employees they view as being beneath them. We also do a lot of server work, workstations, data retention services/data security.
We also provide extra services or guarantees that probably go well beyond industry standard
(the cost we place on ourselves for this aspect of our work is definitely not standard for other competitors) for situations where if a sudden fire should break out or a natural disaster hits the area, is the company data safe?
Our real-time offsite data protection people are some of the most brilliant people I've ever come across in any field, and multiple companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Disney, just to name a few, have been poaching our very best consistently since like 2016 or a bit before.
Shit, I even got a job offer or two, but declined each time for family reasons and just plain being too scared to leave a job this secure that more or less changed my life. Would only leave if it were somehow going out of business, but I would be prepared to go down with the ship. Good people here. Management doesn't mind when all these companies poach our employees because it then leads to people who loved working here being in positions to keep the contracts coming, and even opening up bigger opportunities for us. So when they poach one of us we just earn even more internal boosters and advocates for what we do best in the bigger companies. There are very few major games publisher in gaming today we have likely not done business with in one form or another. Yes, that includes non U.S. publishers like Ubisoft, Bandai, Capcom etc.
To my knowledge, the only company I can't ever recall us working with is Nintendo, but I suspect that could end up changing in the next 2 years. We even have movie contracts. All 3 John Wick movies being the highlights.
I said all that to provide background for the most important part of of this post.
No matter what you might think about how much Microsoft is insulated against interest rate hikes, companies like mine that these companies do business with and get important services from (largely to avoid having to retain too many of their own full-time employees that do the work) are not nearly as fortunate. As much business as we do, we don't get whatever special privileges Microsoft, Apple, Amazon or Google might be receiving, at least probably nowhere near to the same degree.
Interest rate hikes kick our ass, and when our costs inevitably go up to do business, Microsoft's and everybody else's costs that we work with also goes up because we have to increase our prices. And because they all pay those increased prices without complaint, that alone is proof interest rate hikes do, in fact, affect them all because it affects the outside contractors and businesses that they need to pay more.
So, yes, that's why I stand by what I said. This deal is a slam dunk. There are factors at play here that go well beyond what everybody is paying attention to and talking about. I said before Activision has nearly 10,000 employees. The number of additional jobs that are intertwined for better or worse with the two companies (Microsoft and Activision Blizzard) looking to close this transaction is very likely many times that figure. They're always going to pick what they feel is the better outcome for jobs over specific industry competition concerns.
