Daily Pulse: Dow and Dupont on Their Way to the Altar, Mining's Great Depression, And the Time Person of the Year Is...

Dow Chemical and Dupont are in advanced talks to merge. The two chemical giants are among America's oldest corporations, with more than three centuries of history together and a combined worth of $120 billion. If concluded and approved by regulators -- far from guaranteed -- the merger would would crown an already record year with $4.35 trillion in M&As. The deal makes sense financially, writes the WSJ's Dennis K. Berman in a perfect editorial, but it amounts to Dow and Dupont throwing in the towel. From ever shrinking plane seats to concatenating pharma companies, corporate America is sending us a message. 

Self-confidence seems to brim only in Silicon Valley. Across the American business world, the goal is to cut costs, consolidate, do more with less.
Dennis K. Berman, financial editor at The Wall Street Journal

Et tu, Yahoo! Confidence isn't brimming everywhere in Silicon Valley. Yahoo has given up on spinning off its Alibaba stake – since the IRS was unlikely to accept it as tax-free – and is instead exploring the sale of its core business and Yahoo! Japan stake. Which, as my colleague John C. Abell points out, would make what's left of Yahoo little more than a holding company and – pardon the temporary punditry – put Marisa Mayer at the helm of a ship on its way to the breaking yard.  

The hits keep on coming in the mining business. Anglo American is cutting 85,000 jobs (that's eighty-five thousands) or two-thirds of its current payroll. Commodity prices have been sinking across the board as production capacity quickly grew to accommodate Chinese demand – and then China slowed down. That's why you're seeing a country like Australia, fresh off a 15-year boom, suddenly hurting. A quarter of a million jobs have disappeared globally this year in oil and mining.

Trading isn't what it once was. Morgan Stanley is cutting 1200 jobs on its trading floor. "You cannot continue to pay people at these high levels when there's higher capital requirements and lower return on equity," Bloomberg's William Cohan explained. We've heard this somewhere else recently.

North Face cofounder Douglas Tompkins, 72, died in a kayak accident in Chile. He had given up the life of a top executive in Silicon Valley to live his (sometimes controversial) passion for ecology in Patagonia.  

Australian police raided the Sydney home of Craig Wright, hours after Wired outed him as the possible creator of Bitcoin. Police say one has nothing to do with the other and Wright is being investigated for tax reasons. Which is the oldest trick in the book when you have other motives.

Who is it? This morning on the Today show, Time announced its person of the year. Although Bernie Sanders won the readers' vote by a landslide, he wasn't on the shortlist—and Donald Trump wasn't particularly pleased with the winner. But Time says of their pick, German chancellor Angela Merkel: "Today, the importance of Angela Merkel—Germany’s first female chancellor and its first born in East Germany—isn’t exactly in question."

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Photo: Professional surfer Albee Layer drops into a wave at the Jaws Surf Break aka Pe'ahi in Haiku, Maui, HI. on December 6, 2015 in Wailea, Hawaii. (Photo by Darryl Oumi/Getty Images for TAG Heuer)

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