When You Say Budweiser, You've Said It All

Who says there's no credit available? The owners of Belgium's InBev managed to scrape together $54.8 billion with no trouble, and now the Busch family is out of the beer business.

InBev lusted after Anheuser-Busch for quite some time, drooling at the idea of a merger. It's a marriage of behemoths, a happy union, at least for those who profit from the deal. They've hyphenated their last times, to show how equal they are. When you say Anheuser-Busch InBev, you've said it all.

The new company stands on top of the beer world as the largest, nudging aside the upstart SABMiller.

For the employees of Anheuser-Busch, they can take little consolation in the fact that their new partner is noted for cost cutting with a chain saw rather than a scalpel. And they can take even less consolation in the need for InBev to slash $1.5 billion in costs over the next three years.

What does that mean? Ask the people who toil away for the whale-swallowing minnow, HMRiverdeep. It means redundancies, hundreds and hundreds of redundancies. One big firm doesn't need two bookkeeping departments, two marketing departments, two finance departments, etc. and so on. Hundred and hundreds of realized synergies, as workers get the sack so that InBev can lay claim to the championship title.

Anheuser-Busch InBev has taken on a $7 billion bridge loan, expecting to pay it off in a year via sales of assets. Might one of those assets be a brewery? The Busch theme parks? Half of St. Louis, Missouri?

With the economy sliding, will Bud and Michelob continue to generate $36 billion in annual sales? Will Stella Artois fly out of the tap at the local? There's a lot of beer that has to be chugged if ABI is to survive.

Funny, how ABI managed to line up financing while the Big Three automakers in Detroit have gone empty-handed. It says a lot about who the banks believe has the best chance to survive the current climate.