Once upon a time there was a huge retail and mail order chain called Sears Roebuck.

It's gone, but one of its offspring is part of a huge merger this morning.

I'm David Brancaccio in New York. Capital One Bank has

announced plans to acquire the credit card company Discover in a 35 billion

dollar deal which you might not know is that Discover was started by the late lamented Sears.

Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genser has some background.

Once upon a time, Sears Department stores were everywhere.

Big Fat Sears catalogs appeared in the mail, poured over by kids making

a holiday wishless. A subsidiary of Sears, Dean Witter, launched the Discover Card in 1986. It wasn't unusual for department stores to offer their

own credit cards but those cards were only good in their stores. The Discover

card was different because it was accepted by other merchants. It competes with

Visa and Mastercard. Capital One is one of the biggest banks in the country. Now it

wants to become a global payments company. U.S. regulators still have to approve the deal as do

shareholders of both companies. Last year discovered disclosed it was

undergoing a regulatory review over incorrectly classified credit card accounts, which caused merchants

to overpay Discover.

I'm Nancy Marshall Genser for Marketplace.

Israel's economy is shrunk by an annualized 20% amid the war that followed the Hamas

attack October 7th, putting 300,000 military reservists onto active duty as part of

this.

In Gaza, Palestinian experts say the economy there is barely running at subsistence levels.

Now to China today where officials are cutting the cost of borrowing to buy property to try to

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