Two Huge Buyouts This Morning

It turns out that the Home Depot (HD) buyouts rumors were completely unfounded, but the mergers are still coming. This morning, Bank of New York (BK) announced that it’s hitching up with Mellon Financial (MEL).
Here’s a weird twist. Both banks have been led by Secretaries of the Treasury. No, really!
Mellon Financial dates back to 1869 when it was started by Thomas Mellon, the father of the future Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon.
The Bank of New York is one of the oldest companies in America. It was founded by Alexander Hamilton, our first SecTreas. (He was also the guy who…um..lost the duel.) BNY was the first stock ever traded on the NYSE.
The other news is LSI Logic (LSI) is buying up Agere (AGR) for $4 billion. I can’t prove this, but I’ve always believed that a secret part of the government’s breakup plan for AT&T was to have each spinoff have a worse and worse name (Lucent, Avaya). Just a hunch.

Posted by on December 4th, 2006 at 9:18 am


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