Fresh reports of the coming of a Fox News business channel. Of course, Rupert Murdoch has been promising to get one off the blocks since 2004, but now he’s so serious he’s even cracking jokes:

“…we have to recruit some money honeys,” chuckled Murdoch, referring to the now-trademarked nickname of CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo.

Slate‘s Daniel Gross summed up the financial news cable market like this back in 2005, and not much has changed:

Fox News creator Roger Ailes ran CNBC in its salad days, and he understands the economics of the business. Yes, CNNfn’s demise suggests that there isn’t enough room for another financial network. But it could just be that the failure of CNNfn was a symptom of CNN’s general malaise.

It’s an open question if Ailes can replicate his Fox News success in business news. Fox News Channel succeeded because it easily and smartly defined itself in opposition to what its core audience perceived to be bias on the part of the other networks. But nobody regards CNBC and Bloomberg TV the way Fox viewers regarded CNN and MSNBC.

Currently Fox News business means Neil Cavuto who hosts “Your World w/.” The remainder of Fox’s business shows are shoe-horned into a two-hour Saturday morning block, tagged The Cost of Freedom.

The tone? According to Business Week:

…he implicitly whacked the editorial tilt at General Electric’s CNBC as somehow antagonistic to business, a conclusion almost any observer of the channel will find difficult to support, by promising a Fox channel would be “more business-friendly than CNBC.” That channel “leap[s] on every scandal, or what they think is a scandal,” he said.

Mr Murdoch also aired some regrets over the WSJ:

As for another favorite Murdoch target, The Wall Street Journal and parent company Dow Jones, Murdoch, perhaps for the first time, disavowed interest in the business daily, grimacing briefly before conceding, “I must say I am cooling on it.”

[On] The move by the Journal to place more news on the Web as it has shrunk the dimensions of the physical product, he said, “takes all the excitement out of reading it.” In any event, though, he said, “I don’t think I will get it, and I don’t think they will sell it.”

The opportunity for the Journal, he said, was to compete much harder with The New York Times in areas of national and global news.

So what does all this mean in the UK? Well, it is interesting to note that the Financial Times could be coming up for sale. Competition issues might prevent a Murdoch purchase, but that doesn’t stop The Business day dreaming about the possibility in a piece looking ahead to Xmas 2007:

Elsewhere, one of the half-dozen private equity consortia to lose out in the bidding auction for J Sainsbury has consoled itself with a break-up bid for Pearson, the books-to-newspapers group. Their first action (after sacking Dame Marjorie Scardino as chief executive) was to sell the Financial Times to Rupert Murdoch for £650m, using the proceeds to pay down debt.

The pink pages will have to go…