DEBORAH MARCHINI, CNN ANCHOR: The Dutch software company Baan has been bought out for $700 million, just a small fraction of what it was once worth.</s>DAVID HAFFENREFFER, CNN ANCHOR: Lionel Barber, of the "Financial Times," joins us now from the "FT"'s London newsroom. This was a bargain basement price, wasn't it?</s>LIONEL BARBER, NEWS EDITOR, "FINANCIAL TIMES": Well, it may be bargain basement but some of the shareholders in Invensys, which is this British engineering and computer conglomerate, are not particularly happy; and so their shares have fallen back. On the other hand, when you look at what Baan was worth just a year ago, it really was one of those high-fliers. Interesting angle here, we'd like to know what Boeing, which is a big customer of Baan, thinks about this deal. So we're going to be pursuing that in Seattle today.</s>MARCHINI: Second question, the European economies are going pretty great guns, I understand there was a drop in the French jobless rate to below 10 percent. Should we credit the 35-hour work week for this? or is something else going on?</s>BARBER: Well, I think it's what we, in France, like to call "Le Boom." We're going to see more than 3 1/2 percent growth this year in France. And actually, I was in Paris talking to some of the senior officials in the government and one said: Well, of course, we've got this kind of growth, because we spent most of the '90s strangling the patient; with a very tight monetary policy to get into monetary union. And now, we've released some of our stranglehold, there's a lighter monetary policy, and of course, the economy's growing. So I think that's the real reason.</s>MARCHINI: All right, thanks a lot, Lionel Barber of the "FT," great to see you.
'Financial Times': Invensys Buys Baan for $714M, Plans Restructuring; French Jobless Rate Falls to Lowest Level Since '91