Borrowed Money--Wait, isn't that as American as apple pie?

This is sort of interesting. Despite a tight credit market, InBev managed to score forty billion (or 86.4% of the total) of its $46 billion offer on credit.

InBev, the brewer of Stella Artois and Beck's, said it would finance its $46.3 billion bid for Anheuser-Busch with at least $40 billion in debt and a combination of non-core asset sales and equity financing.

"This is going to be one of the top five global consumer companies. People want to hold the debt," said a source familiar with the InBev offer. "For the right deal in the right industry, banks will come up with the money."

That's one kinghell of a bet. InBev really thinks Bud is a great company, don't they? Interestingly, A-B could block the deal by getting bigger:

Something that may play a role in whether or not the deal goes through is Anheuser-Busch's joint venture with Grupo Modelo, brewer of the Mexican beer Corona. Modelo might see the Inbev proposal as a chance to buy back Anheuser's half of the joint venture, but it is unlikely that Bud would go for it, said Douglas Cogen, co-chair of the mergers and acquisitions group at Fenwick & West.

If Anheuser-Busch, on the other hand, purchased Modelo's half of the profitable joint venture, something that is rumored to happen, it would add $10.0 billion to $15.0 billion to its value, making it more difficult for InBev to follow through with the deal.

I know, I know, you don't care about this deal. Still, I can't stop myself from telling you one more thing. In reaction to this deal, wherein Belgians (who speakFrench!) gain the reigns of an American behemoth, nationalists are in a tizzy.

The Save AB website, which has garnered more than 8,000 signatures, compares the Budweiser brewer's place in the American pysche to “baseball and apple pie”, adding: “With your help we can fight the foreign invasion of AB. We will fight to protect this American treasure. We will take to the internet, to the streets, to the marble halls of our capitals, whatever it takes to stop the invasion.”