In a fun turn of events for technology reporters and Wall Street, Dish Network decided to put together a $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel, offering a competing bid to Japanese Softbank’s.

Here are some of the details from the New York Times:

The pay-TV operator Dish Network said on Monday that it had submitted a $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel.

The move is an attempt to scupper the planned takeover of Sprint Nextel by the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank, which agreed in October to acquire a 70 percent stake in the American cellphone operator in a complex deal worth about $20 billion.

Dish Network thinks it can do better. Under the terms of its proposed bid, Dish Network said it was offering a cash-and-stock deal worth about 13 percent more than SoftBank’s bid.

Dish Network values its offer at $7 a share, including $4.76 in cash and the remainder in its shares. The offer is 12.5 percent above Sprint Nextel’s closing share price on Friday.

“The Dish proposal clearly presents Sprint shareholders with a superior alternative to the pending SoftBank proposal,” said Charles W. Ergen, Dish Network’s chairman.

Mr. Ergen said a “Dish/Sprint merger will create the only company that can offer customers a convenient, fully integrated, nationwide bundle of in- and out-of-home video, broadband and voice services.”

The Wall Street Journal put the latest move by Dish into great context in this piece:

The unsolicited offer is Mr. Ergen’s most audacious attempt yet to move from the slow-growing pay-television business into the fast-evolving wireless industry. The satellite TV pioneer eased into the industry by amassing spectrum and winning approval from regulators last year to use it to offer land-based mobile-phone service. But he lacks much of the rest of the operation, including a cellphone network, which would be costly and time-consuming to build.

Combining his company with Sprint would allow Dish to offer video, high-speed Internet and voice service across the country in one package whether people are at home or out and about, Mr. Ergen said. People who don’t have access to broadband from a cable company would be able to sign up for Internet service delivered wirelessly from Sprint cellphone towers to an antenna installed on their roof, Mr. Ergen said.

Taking over Sprint would be a big bite. The wireless carrier booked $35.3 billion in revenue last year, compared with $14.3 billion for Dish. The combined company would carry more than $36 billion in debt, according to CapitalIQ, even before loading on the $9 billion Dish indicated it would borrow to do the deal.

Dish said it would be able to execute a definitive merger agreement after reviewing Sprint’s books. The satellite company said it is being advised by Barclays, which is confident it can raise the funding.

Earlier this year, Dish made an informal offer to buy Clearwire Corp. —a wireless carrier that is half-owned by Sprint and that has agreed to sell Sprint the other half. Dish has yet to move forward with a formal bid.

Mr. Ergen said the “deck was stacked against us” with Clearwire due to a tangle of contractual obligations. With Sprint, the only obstacle is a $600 million breakup fee that would be due Softbank. He said he is willing to pay that.

Bloomberg Businessweek wrote a frequently asked questions piece, which offered this info on regulatory and David Einhorn’s position in Sprint:

Are there regulatory issues?
Probably not. Given the power of Verizon (VZ) andAT&T (T), analysts don’t expect a Dish, Sprint tie-up to hit anti-trust hurdles. On the contrary, Dish says the deal would be particularly good news for rural consumers who don’t have access to traditional broadband. If there’s anything FCC commissioners like, it’s rural consumers.

How about that David Einhorn? 
Right? Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital snapped up a bunch of Sprint shares as the company swooned in recent years. At the end of the first quarter last year, when Sprint shares were wallowing below $3, Greenlight had 68 million of them.

The Bloomberg wire story quoted an analyst as saying the deal had some merits despite the heavy debt load the potential company might hold:

The combined company will have an estimated $40 billion in debt, a heavy load, said Philip Cusick, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. Still, the long-term synergies and cash generation make the idea “very compelling,” he said.

“The next question is the response from the Sprint board and whether Softbank comes back with another bid, potentially using its balance sheet advantage with more cash,” Cusick, who has a neutral rating on Dish, said in a report.

Dish’s offer extends a frenzy of consolidation for the U.S. wireless industry. Smaller carriers are seeking out merger partners to help wage a stronger attack against the two dominant competitors, Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc.

T-Mobile USA Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. carrier, is closing in on a merger with MetroPCS Communications Inc. (PSC), which is No. 5 in the industry. Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE), T-Mobile’s parent company, sweetened its offer for MetroPCS last week in order to get reluctant investors to agree to the terms.

It’s going to be interesting to see which deal the Sprint board selects and what reasons they offer for their choice. Dish obviously has grand ambitions and sees some part of Sprint playing into its plans. But does the Sprint board agree? Only time will tell.

There were two similar stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on Thursday about the complexity of large financial firms and what they’re doing to simplify their structures.

The Journal story focused on the number of subsidiaries that many of the largest financial firms have and where they’re located.

Here’s the story:

Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive John Stumpf has described the bank’s business model as “meat and potatoes.” But the fourth-largest U.S. lender has 3,675 subsidiaries, up 8.6% from five years ago, according to an analysis provided to The Wall Street Journal by Swiss research firm Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Inc.

Wells Fargo isn’t alone. In all, the six largest U.S. banks have 22,621 subsidiaries, according to the Journal’s analysis.

While that is down 18% in the past five years, regulators said they are getting frustrated with banks’ slow and uneven progress in streamlining their labyrinths of business units, offshore entities and other appendages.

Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry, whose agency oversees national banks, said in an interview that his staff intends to pay closer attention to “needless corporate complexity” and “whether it’s time to start cutting some of the brush out.”

The sprawling nature of the largest U.S. banks will be on display starting Friday, when Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase Co. report first-quarter financial results. A Wells Fargo spokesman declined to comment on the data provided by Bureau van Dijk “because we do not know its methodology” and said its filings show subsidiaries down by 23% since the end of 2008, to 1,361. The number of legal entities “is not an indicator of risk and Wells Fargo has a long track record of prudent risk management in all our businesses.”

Complexity in the banking sector has vexed regulators since the financial crisis, when troubles at big U.S. firms quickly spread throughout global markets. The U.S. government intervened to prop up the largest firms, prompting calls to break up those deemed “too big to fail.”

Regulators have introduced rules requiring banks to maintain a fatter financial cushion against losses than other institutions, accept strict limits on the biggest banks’ exposure to one another and submit a new set of plans showing how they would be unwound in the crisis.

And according to the Times, some of the largest firms are shifting assets and risk to other parts of the market, which may cause regulators to have a skewed picture of their capital.

Banks have been shedding risky assets to show regulators that they are not as vulnerable as they were during the financial crisis. In some cases, however, the assets don’t actually move — the bank just shifts the risk to another institution.

This trading sleight of hand has been around Wall Street for a while. But as regulators press for banks to be safer, demand for these maneuvers — known as capital relief trades or regulatory capital trades — has been growing, especially in Europe.

Citigroup, Credit Suisse and UBS have recently completed such trades. Rather than selling the assets, potentially at a loss, the banks transfer a slice of the risk associated with the assets, usually loans. The buyers are typically hedge funds, whose investors are often pensions that manage the life savings of schoolteachers and city workers. The buyers agree to cover a percentage of losses on these assets for a fee, sometimes 15 percent a year or more.

The loans then look less worrisome — at least to the bank and its regulator. As a result, the bank does not need to hold as much capital, potentially improving profitability.

Some regulators say they are concerned that in some instances these transactions are not actually taking risk off bank balance sheets. For instance, a financial institution may end up lending money to clients so they can invest in one of these trades, a move that could leave a bank with even more risk on its books.

Critics point to other reasons to worry. Most of these trades are structured as credit-default swaps, a derivative that resembles insurance. These kinds of swaps pushed the insurance giant American International Group to the brink of collapse in September 2008. Another red flag is that banks often use special-purpose vehicles located abroad, frequently in the Cayman Islands, to structure these trades.

Both these stories, while different in focus and tone, tackle the complicated issue of simplifying the banks and determining if they’re making progress toward complying with new laws. As the rules continue to be shaped, coverage of the banks and if they’re working to prevent a collapse will be increasingly important and likely to go on for years.

The news that J.C. Penney replaced CEO Ron Johnson, who tried to remake the retailer into a one-price clothing store, means that activist investors won. And it also means the company is returning to the leadership of former CEO Myron Ullman.

The coverage was mostly complimentary. Here’s the New York Times basic take on the news:

After a troublesome 17-month run, Ron Johnson is out as chief executive of J. C. Penney, and with that, the most closely watched revival effort in retail in recent memory is in danger of disintegrating.

The company’s board said on Monday that Mr. Johnson, who engineered Apple’s retail strategy, is leaving Penney and that Myron E. Ullman III, who had been C.E.O. at the retailer for seven years until Mr. Johnson took over, has returned to the helm.

Talk of Mr. Johnson’s possible departure had been swirling in recent weeks as Penney’s troubles with sales and strategy mounted, and as William A. Ackman, the activist investor and board member who recruited Mr. Johnson to revive Penney’s fortunes, seemed to withdraw support for him late last week.

Still, it is a curious move to go back to Mr. Ullman. Most of the senior employees that he had assembled at Penney either left or were dismissed by Mr. Johnson. And it was dissatisfaction with where Mr. Ullman was taking the company that led Mr. Ackman to look for another leader in the first place. Though profitable, Penney was seen as a mediocre retailer that was losing ground to competitors like Macy’s and Kohl’s.

The Wall Street Journal took the angle of what the returning CEO will likely keep of JC Penney’s new retail strategy and what will likely be replaced in order to make up some of that lost market share:

The mini boutiques with which Mr. Johnson planned to pepper Penney are likely out the door, analysts say. And reestablishing relationships with vendors is probably a priority.

Investor concern remains high: In early trading Tuesday, Penney stock was down about 10%.

Mr. Ullman is likely to take a close look at the company’s biggest transformation project: its home department. The multi-million dollar project includes bringing in fresh merchandise and new stagings.

Mr. Ullman’s stamp isn’t likely to be too heavy handed at the start.

“One thing they can’t do is swing the pendulum back to the way things were under Mr. Ullman because that wasn’t working either,” said Kathy Gersch, co-founder of Kotter International, a leadership consulting firm. “As a management team, they have to take a look at who their customer is and what they want and move in that direction. And that can’t be Ron Johnson’s or Mr. Ullman’s.”

“Perhaps Mr. Ullman can take the best ideas from Mr. Johnson’s regime, such as the specialty shops—but where will the cash come from to execute it—and abandon the worst ideas, such as eliminating discounts and clogging the aisles with gelato stands, and return the company to its former glory,” said Carol Levenson, director of research at Gimme Credit, a corporate bond research firm.

There are also personnel issues that will have to be dealt with. For instance, there has been no word of the fate of Chief Financial Officer Kenneth Hannah, who Mr. Johnson brought in, or other of his top management hires that remain.

Mr. Ullman “is coming in, but he’s not coming back to the same leadership team he had when he left,” given Mr. Johnson having brought in his own people, said Ms. Gersch. “Mike Ullman needs to pull that team together because they have a short period to get things back in order.”

The Bloomberg coverage was the most drastic, saying the retailer may have to sell itself in order to regain its previous place in the market:

J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) made a radical break with tradition by hiring Silicon Valley wunderkind Ron Johnson as chief executive officer. With Johnson gone, the chain may have to pursue even more radical options, such as selling itself.

Ullman faces several tough choices. He’ll have to decide whether to continue Johnson’s strategy of turning the chain into a collection of boutiques or return to a more traditional department-store model. Ullman will also have to consider whether to sell the company or break it up, said Dave Larcker, a corporate governance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Stanford, California.

“The board is going to have to get much more involved in the strategy of the company,” Larcker said. “People may attack the board, as well, for how this happened. This was a high- profile hire. For it to unravel this quickly is kind of terrifying.”

The Plano, Texas-based chain was so damaged under Johnson that Ullman will struggle to turn it around. On Feb. 27, J.C. Penney reported annual revenue dropped to $13 billion, the lowest since at least 1987. Johnson alienated the company’s core customers by doing away with sales and promotions and only recently began trying to win them back by putting discounts front and center again.

“There is a tremendous amount of cleaning up and rebuilding that has to take place,” Howard Gross, managing director of the retail and fashion practice at executive search firm Boyden in New York, said in a telephone interview.

Johnson’s appointment as CEO in November 2011 was greeted with much anticipation by analysts and investors. After all, he had helped Steve Jobs prove doubters wrong by turning Apple Inc.’s stores into a success with unrivaled sales per square foot. Johnson was expected to work similar feats at J.C. Penney, which was struggling for relevance. The shares surged 17 percent on June 14, 2011, the day Johnson’s hiring was announced, for the biggest gain in more than a decade.

It looks like Ullman doesn’t have the same star power with investors. It’s interesting that the retailer would return to an ousted CEO in order to right itself. It’s likely to be a closely watched story in the next several quarters as the company sorts through strategy, management and what it’s going to look like in the future. I’m sure the press will chronicle each and every move, likely putting different spins on the news.

The next coup will be who gets the first interview with Ullman as he retakes the helm.

Banks in the United Kingdom need more capital, even after new regulations created during the financial crisis.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal story:

U.K. banks must come up with £25 billion ($38 billion) in fresh capital this year, the Bank of England warned Wednesday, piling pressure on partly state-owned banks Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and Lloyds Banking Group PLC to step up the pace of asset sales.

The Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee said banks’ capital buffers need to be higher to withstand the effects of the weak domestic economy and euro-zone crisis. Gov. Mervyn King, a member of the FPC, said the shortfall isn’t “an immediate threat to the banking system and the problem is perfectly manageable.”

Analysts said the £25 billion figure is roughly what they had expected since the FPC in November said banks might be underestimating their potential losses on U.K. commercial real estate and loans to borrowers in weakened euro-zone countries such as Ireland and Spain.

How the capital will be raised wasn’t immediately clear. Bank of England Deputy Gov. Andrew Bailey, who also sits on the FPC, said around half of the £25 billion is already in banks’ plans for the year. The most common ways for lenders to improve their capital positions are to issue new shares, retain earnings or reduce their overall assets.

The New York Times story had good context and a comparison to the U.S. banking sector at the top of its story, information that many shareholders are likely searching for at this point.

The announcement follows a five-month inquiry by British officials into the financial strength of the country’s banking industry. With the world’s largest financial institutions facing new stringent capital requirements, the Bank of England had been concerned that local firms did not have large enough capital reserves to offset instability in the world’s financial industry.

Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve also released the results of so-called stress tests of America’s largest banks, which indicated that most big banks had sufficient capital to survive a severe recession and major downturn in financial markets. Citigroup and Bank of America, after disappointing performance the previous year, now appeared to be among the strongest.

British banks are not so lucky.

The reported released on Wednesday said that local banks had overstated their capital reserves by a combined £50 billion, which authorities said would now be adjusted on the firm’s balance sheets. Many of the country’s banks already have enough money to handle the accounting adjustment, the report said on Wednesday.

Bloomberg’s story did mention that the capital shortfall wouldn’t require more government investment in the banks, which should put some minds at ease.

BOE Governor Mervyn King said the shortfall “is not an immediate threat to the banking system and the problem is perfectly manageable.” He also said the recommendations won’t require additional government investment in banks.

Lenders will have to reach a common equity tier 1 capital ratio of 7 percent of risk-weighted assets by the end of 2013. While some banks already exceed this level, those that don’t will have to boost capital or restructure their balance sheets without hindering lending to the economy, the BOE said.

“It’s a relatively low bar,” said Cormac Leech, a banking analyst at Liberum Capital Ltd. in London. “They’re saying that the banks will continue to build capital to comply with that metric, so it doesn’t sound like there’s a massive pressure on the banks to exceed Basel III requirements.”

It’s clear that the world’s banks are still reeling from bad loans and struggling to maintain capital ratios up to the new standards. Here’s hoping they can figure it out and raise the money from the private market. I doubt that public sentiment anywhere in the world would support another bank bailout.