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President Donald Trump's threat to block the $85 billion deal between AT&T and Time Warner has yet to materialize. Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes even scoffed at the notion back in May. However, that could soon change due to the adverse relationship between the White House and Time Warner-owned CNN. President Trump’s reposting of an altered wrestling video was celebrated by its creator on Reddit. Enlarge President Trump’s reposting of an altered wrestling video was celebrated by its creator… more Recall how CNN was recently hit with a $100 million lawsuit after it retracted a story detailing how Senate...

Amazon is looking to reduce costs at Whole Foods with a new automated checkout system that would render thousands of cashiers redundant, it has been reported. Carmen Clark, 37, an employee at the Mount Pleasant Whole Foods, said, 'Everybody's been kind of joking that it's going to be robots and drones,' after the Amazon bought the grocery chain for $13.7 billion. It turns out Clark wasn't that far off, since Amazon is trying to reduce prices by replacing cashiers with a new mobile payment system, according to a person familiar with the company's plans who spoke to Bloomberg. But Amazon...

Since President Donald J. Trump took office on January 20th, almost 3,100 merger or acquisition (M&A) deals have been announced, per recently released data from Thomson Reuters. 2017 continues to be the art of the deal as there have already been 13 deals valued at over $5 billion dollars since the Trump administration took charge. Cross-border deals are also at record highs. As the mainstream media continues to decry the mounting political and economic uncertainty around the world as a result of the hard-to-predict Trump administration, the global economy centered around the vibrant U.S. market appears to be doing just...

Could Apple buy Disney? It would be a huge deal, worth hundreds of billions of dollars — and that's what analysts are speculating about on Thursday. Research from RBC Capital Markets says such a merger would produce a "tech/media juggernaut like no other" — the combination of the biggest tech company in the world and a near-century-old cultural titan. "The resultant company would be massive, with enough cash and balance sheet capacity to change the nature of the hardware, service, and content industries," the analysts wrote in a note to investors....

Love that Chicken from... Ontario? Restaurant Brands International Inc. (NYSE: QSR) will buy Atlanta-based Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen Inc. (NASDAQ: PLKI) for $1.8 billion. Popeyes shareholders will get $79 in cash a share at closing -- a premium of 27 percent based on Popeyes’ 30-trading day Volume Weighted Average Price as of Feb. 10. The deal, expected to close by early April 2017, brings the New Orleans spicy chicken brand to the Ontario, Canada-based company that owns Burger King and Tim Hortons. Popeyes will continue to be managed independently in the United States. RBI plans to continue developing the brand at...

Top Media Reporter Hints Murdochs Could Tap CNN’s Zucker to Run Fox News Daniel Nussbaum 25 Oct 2016 In a piece exploring AT&T’s pending $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, top media journalist and author Michael Wolff floats an interesting theory: namely, that if either former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin or current CNN chief Jeff Zucker don’t replace outgoing Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, Zucker could be tapped by Rupert Murdoch’s sons to replace Roger Ailes atop Fox News. Wolff explains in a column at the Hollywood Reporter:

Donald Trump expressed that he would not approve the AT&T and Time Warner merger if elected president. "Deals like this destroy democracy," said Trump during a rally in Gettysburg, Pa., on Saturday, where he discussed what he would do in the first 100 days of his presidency.

A federal judge has blocked the proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot, saying the government had made the case that the merger had a "reasonable probability" of hurting competition in office supplies.

Pondering Gravitational Wavesby Paul Gilster on February 11, 2016 "Einstein would be beaming," said National Science Foundation director France Córdova as she began this morning's news conference announcing the discovery of gravitational waves. I can hardly disagree, because we have in this discovery yet another confirmation of the reality of General Relativity. Caltech's Kip Thorne, who discussed black hole mergers way back in 1994 in his book Black Holes and Time Warps, said at the same news conference that Einstein must have been frustrated by the lack of available technologies to detect the gravitational waves his theory predicted, a lack...

The chemical giants DuPont and Dow Chemical Co. agreed to merge in an all-stock deal valuing the combined company at $130 billion, with plans to eventually split into three. The deal, which is likely to face intense regulatory scrutiny, allows the new company — to be called DowDuPont -- to rejig assets based on the diverging fortunes of their businesses that make agriculture chemicals and plastics. Dow and DuPont have been struggling to cope with falling demand for farm chemicals because of falling crop prices and a strong dollar, even as their plastics businesses have thrived thanks to low natural-gas...

Grocery store chain Albertsons Cos. is buying back 33 stores the government required it to sell when it acquired rival Safeway Inc. earlier this year, a highly unusual development approved by a judge on Tuesday that highlights a misfire by U.S. antitrust enforcers. Little has gone according to plan since the Federal Trade Commission allowed the Albertsons-Safeway tie-up in January on the condition that the companies sell 168 stores to preserve competition in several Western states. Without the divestitures, Albertsons would be too dominant in 130 local markets, the FTC said when it agreed to a settlement with the merging...

As was extensively reported over the weekend, the Pfizer-Allergan tax-inverting, reverse-merger (in which the far The combinsmaller Allergan would end up "buying" Pfizer, courtesy of fungible debt which doesn't care where it ends up as long as there are cash flows) would be announced this morning, and sure enough, moments ago the long-awaited press release finally hit. Here are the details:Pfizer and Allergan to Combine Creates a new global biopharmaceutical leader with best-in-class innovative and established businessesEnhances revenue and earnings growth profile of innovative and established businessesBroadens innovative pipeline with more than 100 combined mid-to-late stage programs in developmentTransaction...

The drug giants Pfizer and Allergan are in talks to merge. If successful, the deal could be the largest this year. Allergan has a market value of about $113 billion. It could also offer Pfizer something the US company has been after for a while -- a way to slash its tax bill. It could do so with a so-called tax inversion, a legal move in which a US company merges with a foreign-domiciled company to shift its address to a country with a lower tax rate. In this case it would have Pfizer moving its tax domicile — not...

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world's largest brewer, launched an improved offer for SABMiller on Wednesday, offering just over 68 billion pounds ($104 billion) for its largest rival to extend its reach into Africa and other markets.

Deal could reduce the number of major U.S. insurance companies from five to three. U.S. health insurer Anthem Inc is close to finalizing negotiations to acquire peer Cigna Inc and could announce a roughly $48 billion deal as early as this week, two people familiar with the matter said.

State ObamaCare exchanges are fast running out of cash because of higher-than-expected costs and lower-than-expected enrollment. In an attempt to keep their heads above water, many exchanges are considering combining some of their operations with those of other states — a tactic that may prove as difficult as setting up the exchanges in the first place and that raises the specter of fully nationalized health insurance.The Obama administration, under the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), disbursed about $5 billion in subsidies to states to get their exchanges up and running. After that, the exchanges were supposed to be...

The U.K. government wants BP to still stand for “British Petroleum.” The Financial Times reported that Downing Street would do all it could to block a takeover of BP. Weakened and shrunken down due to the massive, and still rising, toll stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP could become a takeover target from one of the larger oil majors out there. Rumors have been swirling in recent weeks that perhaps ExxonMobil or Chevron could be eyeing the British oil giant, so much so that BP’s CEO Bob Dudley had to publicly dispel any notion that his company is for...

General Motors CEO Mary Barra is dismissing any talk of a possible merger with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. […] Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne recently floated the idea of merging with GM or another global automaker. He is a proponent of industry consolidation and says only the biggest automakers will survive. …

Heinz is buying Kraft Foods to create the world's fifth largest food and beverage company, with sales of about $28 billion. Kraft shares surged more than 33% Wednesday. Kraft owns popular brands such as Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee and Planters peanuts. Heinz, of course, is famous for its ketchup, and also owns Lea & Perrins and Ore-Ida.

This week’s business news concerns yet another high profile corporate merger. Less than two years after office supply and computer retailers Office Depot and Office Max were forced into a merger, it now looks like Staples will be acquiring them. Where once there were three retailers, soon (or eventually, since such consolidations do take time), there will be only one. The Resident of the White House, no doubt remembering that the success of Staples was an early credit to his rival Mitt Romney’s storied career as an investment wizard, lost no time in taking pot-shots against Staples for its employee...