Cigna shareholders voted by a large margin Friday to approve the health insurer's pending acquisition of pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts.
Why it matters: This deal is one step closer to consolidating the big health insurers and the big pharmacy benefit managers under the same roof. The companies say that will save consumers money on prescription drugs, though some policy analysts and researchers are skeptical.
Event ticketing software company Eventbrite, valued at $1.5 billion by private investors, on Thursday filed for a $200 million IPO.
Why it matters: Expect this to be one of many new IPO filings based on where we are on the calendar, as the post-filing waiting period to launch road-shows now brings us past Labor Day, when most institutional investors are back at work.
President Trump touted how crucial his presidency is to the markets' gains, in an interview today with Fox News:
"If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor."
History as guide: Stocks continued to rise during and after Bill Clinton's impeachment, which occurred a bit earlier in a long bull market than where we're at today. Stocks fell when Richard Nixon resigned, but markets were reacting to a confluence of other events like a global oil crisis.
Sears Holdings will close another 46 unprofitable Sears and Kmart stores in November, reports Bloomberg.
The big picture: Sears has closed hundreds of stores in the last two years as its sales get clobbered by the rise of e-commerce. While some competing retailers, like Walmart, Target, Macy's and Kohl's, bounced back in a strong economy and beat analysts' expectations in the second quarter, Sears and J.C. Penney have continued to decline.
Paula Duncan, a juror during Paul Manafort's trial, told Fox News that only one juror's doubt "kept the verdict from being guilty on all 18 counts."
The big picture: President Trump touted the 10 counts that were declared a mistrial on Twitter on Wednesday, and commended him for refusing to "break." Duncan, who described herself as an avid Trump supporter, told Fox that finding Manafort guilty "was hard for me. I wanted him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent, but he wasn't."
Saudi Aramco's troubled IPO plan is increasingly looking dead, or at least in a deep freeze, but the Saudis pushed back against those reports late last night.
Driving the news: Reuters, citing "four senior industry sources," reported yesterday that Saudi Arabia had called off the plan to sell about 5% of the company. And a source familiar with the company's work with outside advisers and banks told me roughly the same thing after their story hit.
"The U.S. stock market has been on the upswing for nine and a half years, during which a cohort of younger investors has never dealt with a 20 percent drop in the S&P 500 — the classic definition of a bear market," AP's Stan Choe writes.
Why it matters: "How they respond will be crucial because this generation bears a heavier responsibility for paying for their own retirement, as pensions go extinct and Social Security’s finances weaken."
Lowe's will begin slashing its in-store inventory and is shutting down its 99 Orchard Supply Hardware locations across the country in hopes of boosting its sales in other areas to compete with Home Depot, CNN Money reports.
Why it matters: The move shows the company's new CEO Marvin Ellison, hired away from JC Penny, is unafraid to make cuts and reduce inventory to focus on other areas he feels the company needs to improve in. The company's second quarter sales increased 5.3% according to CNN, but it still leaves it behind Home Depot at 8%.
