6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:56PM EDT · Published Aug 23, 5:13AM EDT

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The European Union may kill a huge deal for Bayer to purchase Monsanto Co. (NYSE: MON) for $57 billion. Worries about cost increases for farmers who use the products of the companies were among the reasons given.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) launched a new set of pricing plans for mobile subscribers. Among the effects are that people who use the service will get less bandwidth to stream video, resulting in lower quality.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) is close to starting an experiment to offer installment loans to customers. It is another attempt by the large retailer to find services to help it compete with Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Walmart have set a deal to allow people to use the Google Assistant voice product to shop the huge retailer. According to a blog post by Google management:

We’re entering an exciting partnership with Walmart to bring you hundreds of thousands of products at Walmart’s Every Day Low Prices—everything from laundry detergent to Legos—that you can buy through voice with your Assistant on Google Home or on the Google Express website or app.

If you’re an existing Walmart customer, you can choose to link your Walmart account to Google and receive personalized shopping results based on your online and in-store Walmart purchases.

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The Financial Times reports that Vanguard and Fidelity cut the value of their positions in Uber by 15%. The world’s largest ride-sharing service has been plagued by the firing of its CEO and charges of sexual harassment.

Bloomberg reports bank profits could soar under deregulation proposals by the U.S. president:

The deregulation winds blowing through Washington could add $27 billion of gross profit at the six largest U.S. banks, lifting their annual pretax income by about 20 percent.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley would benefit most from changes to post-crisis banking rules proposed by Donald Trump’s administration, with pretax profit jumping 22 percent, according to estimates by Bloomberg based on discussions with analysts and the banks’ own disclosures. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. would have the smallest percentage increase, about 16 percent.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.