The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to the bad romance edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and

finance news of the week.

And I can tell you that in recent weeks it is sometimes,

especially over the summer, being quite hard to come up with a bunch of recent financial news of the week.

And also because there's been this presidential election going on and that's kind of drowned out

everything else. But this week has been completely insane. And we could have

seven shows with what on earth has been going on this week. So we're just going to more or

less pick at random. But I just want to give you a taste. Because I think this is indicative of

something. And maybe we can talk about what just in the past week in terms of mergers.

We had GE looks like it's going to buy Baker Hughes for about $30 billion.

We had BAT, that's British American Tobacco.

It wants to buy like the most, the bit of Reynolds, which is an American tobacco company that it doesn't already own for $47 billion.

There's a telco merger, level three and CenturyLink merging. That's going to create like a $30 billion company.

There's a brokerage merger. We had TD Ameritrade agreed to buy Scott trade.

That was just $4 billion.

That's absolutely nothing.

There's a massive semiconductor merger where Qualcomm, the semi-conductor giant, is buying

this company called, I have to admit, NXP semiconductors, which I had never heard of, but which apparently

makes computer chips for cars and is paying $39 billion for this company I've never heard of.

And so, yeah, love is in the air.

Or bad love.

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