INVESTING: Merger activity no harbinger, but better market coming
On Jan. 28, Procter and Gamble agreed to pay $52 billion to acquire Gillette. Days later, SBC Communications Corp. bought AT&T for $16 billion. The track record of merger-and-acquisition activity on Wall Street leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the mergers involving large operations fail to generate anywhere near the returns management promises. But as soon as I heard about the P&G deal, I thought a lot of things make sense here. First of all, neither one of…