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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 dollars. We had B. A. T. That's British American

Tobacco. Try it. 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 dollars. There's a telco merger level three and CenturyLink

merging that's going to create a $30 billion company.

...