There’s a lot of speculation circulating about whether leading biotechnology firm Genentech will accept pharmaceutical giant Roche’s $43.7 billion takeover bid, the largest pharma/biotech merger price tag in several years.

The offer came as a surprise for Genentech, which has maintained a unique culture despite Roche’s controlling ownership stake. If Roche’s offer is accepted, the pharmaceutical giant says that it wants to keep Genentech independent so as not to squelch its innovative atmosphere. I imagine that Genentech executives and employees are wondering whether this goal is realistic though, especially since Roche has also announced its intention to integrate some US functions to cut costs.

Also at issue is the popular opinion that the offer is undervalued, only giving a 9% premium over Genentech’s stock value. Some analysts and investors are betting that Roche will have to up its offer before Genentech will commit, while others feel that Roche will use its advantage as majority shareholder to keep the price down.

Roche has thus far been satisfied with its controlling interest in Genentech, which has allowed it to reap profits from the division while avoiding management duties. The shift in strategy is less of a surprise, however, when you consider current competitive and consolidation trends in the pharmaceutical/generic/biotech industries, as well as the rise of foreign investments in US assets.

Roche itself has made several acquisitions in its quest to remain in the top ranks of drug companies, especially in the areas of biotechnology and diagnostics. (It also recently bumped up its stake in another majority-owned subsidiary, Japan’s Chugai Pharmaceutical.) Like many other pharma companies, Roche is looking to biotechnology firms to bolster its product offerings in the face of generic competition. Generic firms are also joining forces to get ahead of the game.

Though Roche will probably have to raise the stakes, it’s highly likely that Genentech will eventually end up taking the bait in this situation, if for no other reason than to secure its position in the increasingly challenging marketplace. However, let’s not completely discount that the California company may yet fight for its (partial) freedom with San Francisco flair.

We have this idea that the US economy is based on the free market system. The SEC’s new rule against naked short selling for certain companies and entities sure puts paid to that belief.

In short sales, an investor borrows shares of a company, sells them, and hopes the stock price later drops before he has to pay back the shares.  It’s a classic instance of selling high, buying low.

In naked short selling, the investor doesn’t borrow the stock first. Less risk, so more reward — if the stock does fall as expected.

The rule has already raised a chorus of complaints from financial services firms that aren’t on the safe list. It also is probably not the right way to restore stability to the market. Granted, the horse is already out of that barn, but the best way the SEC and the Fed could have stabilized the market was to have put the brakes on the bubble in the first place. But oh no — we have a free market, right? No market interference here.

Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times has a trenchant article on just this topic. She writes:

HERE is a question: Might not the routs, which inevitably follow the manias, be less painful if things were not allowed to get wild and crazy on the upside? Might not the American people be better off with regulators who curb market enthusiasm — whether in the form of errant lending or voracious, ill-considered deal making — when it reaches manic levels, to protect against the free fall, and the bailouts, that ensue?

Since the Fed has no problem with regulating some of the markets some of the time with rules that only apply to certain companies and certain investors, why not drop the pretense of the free market completely and create different regulations that are designed to do exactly what Morgenson suggests — regulate on the upside too?

If that is unpalatable, then when a Bear Stearns, a Lehman, or a Freddie and a Fannie look like they are failing, let the free market take its course.

Hot on the heels of Fresenius’ proposal to buy APP Pharmaceuticals, consolidation in the generics industry continues unabated with two giants in the sector agreeing to make a match. The world’s largest generic drugmaker, Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, announced Friday it would buy Barr Pharmaceuticals, a US-based player with about $2.5 billion in sales in 2007.

Teva is paying a cool $7.5 billion for Barr, in a deal most agree makes sense for the Israeli firm. The acquisition of Barr expands Teva’s market share in the US (particularly in the area of oral contraceptives, Barr’s bread and butter) and gives it presence in fast-growing markets in Central and Eastern Europe, markets Barr entered in 2006 with its own acquisition of Croatian firm PLIVA.

Additionally, the deal adds Barr’s proprietary prescription drug unit Duramed to Teva’s small portfolio of brand-name drugs and expands Teva’s efforts in the nascent field of biogenerics (off-brand versions of difficult-to-replicate biological drugs). Barr’s efforts with biogeneric development — another operation gained with the PLIVA acquisition — will complement Teva’s purchase earlier this year of CoGenesys, a privately held biotech firm formerly part of Human Genome Sciences.

Teva has already been in expansion mode in 2008. In addition to buying CoGenesys, it is in the process of acquiring Bentley Pharmaceuticals’ Spanish drug business. The buying spree is part and parcel of Teva’s intention (announced this year) to reach $20 billion in annual revenue with 20% profit margins by 2012.

The Teva/Barr deal is just the latest (and biggest) in a run of acquisitions and mergers in the generics sector, which is growing at a considerably faster clip than the brand-name pharmaceuticals industry. Last year Mylan bought Merck KGaA’s generics business, a business Teva also made a bid on, for $6.7 billion. And this year, we’ve already seen big deals between Daiichi Sankyo and Ranbaxy, and Fresenius and APP. Nobody expects the trend to stop — only question is, who will be next?

Some television history was made with yesterday’s Emmy nominations. For the first time, two basic cable series, FX’s Damages and AMC’s Mad Men, scored best dramatic series nods, officially cementing the channels further up the dial as serious original programming players to be reckoned with. What’s more stunning was not only that Mad Men scored the most drama nominations of any program at 16, but that it is in a field of six shows — up from the usual five. That says to me that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences wanted to recognize the period piece about the early days of Madison Avenue so badly that they boosted the field rather than cut something else. (Although the continued presence of the sophomorically stupid Boston Legal in this category baffles me to no end.)

I’ve blogged before about basic cable’s recent evolution from second-tier exhibitor of reruns and edited-for-television movies to full-blown networks with original shows that are now serious buzz and ratings competition for the broadcast stalwarts of NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX. First came the ratings and now come the accolades. (Otherwise known as the Tony Montana Principle: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Well, in this case the women would actually be Emmys, but you get the idea.) This is proof that any business — no matter how historically dominant the big players might be — can be shaken up.

The Emmy nominations also continue to provide further proof of the diminished clout of HBO post-Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and The City, etc., and that rival Showtime has largely stepped in to take its place. For the first time in 10 years, the network didn’t have a contender in the Best Drama category. Instead, Showtime’s serial killer drama Dexter scored a nod. HBO is still represented in the Best Comedy category with nominations for Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it also did well in the Made for TV Movies — Recount, which I liked but, man, was that a painful experience to relive — and Miniseries categories. In fact, in the latter, HBO’s John Adams, the biopic about the second US president was the most nominated program of them all, scoring a whopping 23 nods.

Some other pleasant surprises this year: the return of Lost to the Best Drama category after it regained its footing with an outstanding fourth season; continued love shown to The Office for Best Comedy (when work gets bad, I have only to look as far as Dunder Mifflin and say, “At least I don’t work there.”); that they gave props to three of the funniest characters on TV with noms for How I Met Your Mother’s Neil Patrick Harris (”Legendary!“) and Entourage’s Jeremy Piven and Kevin Dillon (all manner of quotes I can’t repeat on a family website).

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the Academy’s willingness to shake things up this year. The Emmys have long been criticized for nominating the same shows and performers over and over again, regardless of quality, and rightly so. It was always very difficult for new blood to break into the race, but this year turned that story on its head. Sure, there’s still some same ‘ol that is expected and boring (Mariska Hargitay and Tony Shalhoub for the millionth time), the mind-boggling “Whys?” (the aforementioned Boston Legal and its hammy actors, Two and a Half Men, and, I’m sorry, but I just don’t get 30 Rock), and the inevitable snubs (Friday Night Lights, never even a bridesmaid much less a bride, and where are my Desperate Housewives in any of the acting categories?). But overall the Emmys finally seem to be getting it more right than not.

Now we just have to see if it holds up when the statues are handed out.

Delighted dolphins, giddy gators, happy herons. What is all this wildlife wonderment about? It seems these and the many other species of fauna and flora that inhabit the Florida Everglades may have been given a pass from extinction. And for once, mankind is not the villain in this tale. In fact, one man, Florida governor Charlie Crist, might be its hero.

Seems the guv had a meeting sometime back with the nabobs at U.S. Sugar Corporation, the largest cane-sugar producer in the country. They, like all good Big Sugar companies are wont to do, went to call on Gov. Crist to complain about Florida enacting some laws that forbade the company from pumping its polluted water back into the Everglades.

Expecting due deference from the guv and a “pat on the back” solution allowing the sugar maker to skirt the new laws — they, again, like all good Big Sugar companies, being large contributors to political campaigns, mostly to pro-business Republican candidates — U.S. Sugar got instead an unexpected, nay, shocking offer. The governor suggested that Florida buy U.S. Sugar. No need to find a way around ever-increasing environmental regulations, just go out of business — and with a pretty penny in its pocket too — $1.75 billion.

It’s a nice bit of money for U.S. Sugar, which has suffered bottom-line woes due to increasing sugar imports from countries such as Brazil and Thailand, which have lower labor costs. (Not to mention having to do continual battle with both the state and the feds over water and land pollution and the rising costs of the clean-ups it is forced to make by these authorities.) The company is also involved in a nasty lawsuit brought by former employees, charging that the company bilked them out of their retirement funds. The deal offered by Crist amounted to some $350 a share, far above other offers it has received over the years. So U.S. Sugar, which has operated on its land since 1931, said, yes, it would sell itself to the state.

And what does Florida get for its pot of gold? It gets, among other assets, 187,000 acres (or about 300 square miles) of land north of Everglades National Park, which the state would turn over to its South Florida Water Management District for use as part of a plan to help restore the Everglades’ pre-development ecosystem. (Cue the dancing endangered animals.)

The land would connect (or reconnect, actually) Florida’s Lake Okeechobee with the so-called River of Grass, the swampy natural waterway that carries overflow from the lake to its natural runoff into the ocean. The waterway, which is made up of marshes and forests rich in reptile and bird life, has been unable to drain itself adequately for years due to development, including sugar farming, and that has led to the stagnation of Lake Okeechobee’s waters.

So the Everglades’ ghost orchids and royal palms can perhaps sway in joy; their death knell has been silenced. Maybe. You see, despite the efforts of the Caped Crusader of the Everglades, Gov. Crist, and the, ahem, pragmatic decision by the elders of U.S. Sugar to sell, the deal might not go through. It seems that U.S. Sugar is owned by its 1,700 employees through an employee-ownership plan. And while the buyout deal allows U.S. Sugar to operate for another six years in order to fulfill its long-term commitments, after that, its employees are facing certain unemployment. Saying it will be regulated out of business anyway, the company has offered its wage earners one year’s pay as severance, with salaried workers being offered two years. The state has offered retraining. The deal is supposed to be finalized by November.

Put yourself in the place of a third-generation sugar worker, living in the small Florida town of Clewiston, being forced to weigh the relative merits of the survival of, oh, say, a rare panther and putting food on his or her family’s table. It’s a tough call.