Finance Roundtable

Few people would disagree that Wall Street lenders, hedge fund and investment banks got a little giddy during the credit boom, extending loans left and right and buying up risky securities linked to dodgy home mortgages.

The result was, in the now-famous words of U.S. President George W. Bush: “Wall Street ...

One year into a credit crisis few expected to last this long, the leveraged-loan market still is a shell of its former self.

Once one of the primary funding sources for a large number of risky U.S. corporations, the market has yet to recover from the ...

It’s summertime and the living is supposed to be easy.

You can watch the market anxiously or go to the movies. My advice? Grab a cold beer and rent a movie. You’ll learn more about business in two hours from one of these films than from reading ...

By Stephen Grocer and Heidi Moore

Deals of the Day includes all the major news of the morning related to mergers and acquisitions and financing. For breaking deal news, turn to the WSJ’s Deals & Deal Makers page, or

Yahoo today revealed how much it was spending on legal fees to defend itself against Microsoft Corp’s hostile offer: $22 million.

That is 17% of Yahoo’s net income this quarter.

The cost of defending the U.S. is considerably higher - as you would expect. In 2007, the Defense Department received ...

M&A practitioners often compare the circuitous yet predictable course of deal negotiations to the carefully-choreographed movements of Japanese kabuki.

Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo, in contrast, has looked more like Steve Ballmer’s wildly famous “Monkey Dance.”

At nearly every turn ...

WSJ colleague Matthew Futterman files this dispatch on the bidding for the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

For months Mark Cuban talked long and loud about his desire to buy the Chicago Cubs, even appearing on a local radio station to make his pitch, writing about it on his blog and being ...

The latest popular import from the Middle East isn’t oil: it is money. And the race is on among American financial institutions to find a deep-pocketed Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth fund that has plenty of it. But, considering how much controversy has surrounded foreign investors, perhaps it is better not to ...

The dog days of summer are here, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of blogging on the M&A front. That said, there are a few that caught our attention:

The seemingly endless saga that has become XM-Sirius’s attempts to win regulatory approval just keeps providing more twists and ...

In “The Third Man,” the character Harry Lime quips: “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!” It may be time to add one more thing to that list: M&A deals.

The $43.7 billion deal for ...