Bear Hug

Entry in progress—B.P.
 
Wiktionary: bear hug
Noun
bear hug (plural bear hugs)
1.any especially large, tight or enthusiastic hug, usually friendly
Granddad scooped up the child in a big bear hug.
2.in business, a hostile takeover effort in which one firm offers to buy the other firm at a share price too high to refuse
3.in wrestling, a hold with the arms around the opponent
 
Investopedia
What Does Bear Hug Mean?
An offer made by one company to buy the shares of another for a much higher per-share price than what that company is worth. A bear hug offer is usually made when there is doubt that the target company’s management will be willing to sell.
 
(Oxford English Dictionary)
bear-hug, n.
1. a. A tight, powerful, enveloping embrace, either as a hearty expression of affection or greeting or as a means of restraint (see also sense 1b). Also fig.
1846 Amer. Rev. Jan. 21/2   His iron fingers tore away the frantic grasp of the madman from his throat—then closing with him he clasped him in the bear-hug of those long heavy arms.
1. b. Wrestling. A hold in which a wrestler joins his or her arms around an opponent, and forces the opponent, thus immobilized, to fall backwards.
[1904 N.Y. Times 3 Dec. 10/5   Egeberg gripped him from behind‥, catching a secure reverse body hold and keeping Plening in his bear’s hug.]
1930 N.Y. Times 6 May 36/4   The German tossed the Philedelphian down with a bar-hammer grip and later secured a bear-hug which lasted for three minutes.
2. U.S. Business. An attractive or irresistible takeover bid, typically an unsolicited or hostile bid set well above market value.
1977 Business Week 16 May 160/1   Most takeover attempts in the past year have started as Bear Hugs.
1980 M. Moskowitz et al. Everybody’s Business 835   A week later came the ‘bear hug’: another letter with an informal offer of $21 a share for the entire company, $4 a share more than the stock was selling for on Wall Street.
1998 Denver Post (Nexis) 27 Aug. c1   Quark’s bear-hug offer to buy all or most of Adobe‥succeeded Wednesday.
 
25 October 1977, New York (NY) Times, “So Sleeping Beauty Was Rescued By White Knight From Bear Hug” by Robert J. Cole, pg. 73:
In the melodramatic idiom of Wall Street, the United Technologies Corporation tried a few months ago to clamp a bear hug around the Babcock & Wilcox Company, but J. Ray McDermott & Company, after initial resistance, eventually came forward as the White Knight and walked off with Sleeping Beauty.
(...)
A bear hug, the board (Conference Board—ed.) continues in explanation of its glossary, is simply a notification to officers of a target company, but not to shareholders, of a proposed bid for the stock at a fixed price, subject to specific conditions.
 
1 December 1978, New York (NY) Times, “Business and the Law: The Language of Takeovers” by Tom Goldstein, pg. D4:
CRIMINAL lawyers often slip into the jargon spoken by rogues. negligence lawyers sometimes sound like physicians talking. And patent lawyers occasionally lapse into scientists’ lingo. Lawyers who specialize in corporate takeovers are no different. They have a language of their own, and it is the language of attack—of “Saturday night specials” and “white knights,” of “bear hugs” and “safe harbors.”
(...)
Some lawyers have described Sun’s purchase of Becton Dickinson’s stock earlier this year as a “bionic bear hug,” suggesting that Becton was not left with a great deal of time or flexibility to oppose the move by Sun.