I have always believed that an early indicator of the economy starting to improve would be a large acquisition by a Fortune 500 company or one of the large private equity firms.
Today the NYT and WSJ announced that IBM is in discussions to buy Sun Microsystems for a 100% premium to the current Sun stock price. The obvious strategic benefit to IBM is that it would strengthen their market position in servers.
Now, if CISCO, who announced last week that they are entering the server market, was to enter the bidding for Sun, that would be very encouraging. CISCO has a long history of acquisitions, which I discussed in this post.
Let's hope I am right and that this is an early indicator that the economy is turning up.
