Saturday, October 17, 2026
Informa, the London-listed events and publishing group, agreed on Tuesday to buy Clarion Events from Blackstone for an enterprise value of £2.24 billion, and launched a process to separate Taylor & Francis, its academic publisher. It raised about £940 million by selling new shares at 860p and paused its share buyback to pay for the deal.
KKR has agreed to buy Gen II Fund Services, which does the accounting, tax and reporting work for more than 275 private investment managers, for an enterprise value of $5.1 billion. The sellers are Hg and General Atlantic, which invested in 2020, along with other minority investors. Gen II says its revenue and earnings have roughly quadrupled since.
Clayton Dubilier & Rice and McKesson agreed on Monday to take Option Care Health, the largest independent home infusion company in the United States, private for $32.05 a share. McKesson is putting in about $1.4 billion for 49 per cent, and the agreement sets out a framework for it to buy the private equity firm's majority later. Lenders have committed more money to the deal than the two buyers have.
Emera and Canadian Utilities agreed on Tuesday to combine in an all-share deal that the companies say is the largest merger ever between two Canadian companies, with a combined enterprise value of about C$72 billion. ATCO, the family-controlled group that has held Canadian Utilities since 1980, will give up that control and spin its housing, defence and ports businesses into a new company.
Uber agreed on Tuesday to buy ezCater, the Boston workplace catering marketplace, for $2.3 billion in cash. The company handled more than $2.5 billion of orders over the past year, at an average of more than $400 each. Six years ago its sales fell 85 per cent when offices emptied, and it rebuilt around workplaces where people still had to turn up.
Lamb Weston, a leading supplier of frozen fries to restaurant chains, grew North American sales volume for a seventh consecutive quarter even as fast-food traffic fell. Its executives credit chicken chains, whose traffic rose 4 per cent, for part of the gain. In Europe, where it says the industry had too much capacity, it has stopped making fries at a Dutch plant.
Unifor will ask more than 9,000 Stellantis workers in Canada to authorise a strike on 17 and 18 October. The union says the company has made the wage and benefit pattern already agreed at Ford and General Motors conditional on the union accepting the closure and sale of the idled Brampton assembly plant to Roshel, an armoured vehicle maker.
The United States imported $420.8 billion of goods and services in August, the most in any month on record, and the trade deficit widened to $105.6 billion, the largest since March 2025. The last record was set by consumer goods rushed in ahead of tariffs. This one is made of capital goods. Four lines of hardware account for more than the whole rise in goods imports this year.
True Food Kitchen, the health-food restaurant chain backed by Oprah Winfrey, filed for Chapter 11 on Sunday and closed 12 of its 46 restaurants. It had about $1.6 million of unrestricted cash, enough for roughly two weeks, and $42.1 million of funded debt, including merchant cash advances. The investor that led its $100 million round in 2022 is now lending it $20 million to stay open while it looks for a buyer.
C.H. Robinson agreed on Sunday to buy RXO, the truck broker spun out of XPO in 2022, for about $5.8 billion including debt. Its own slides value the deal at 13.2 times RXO's expected earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, but only after $300 million of annual cost savings. Without them the multiple is about 42. C.H. Robinson's shares fell 10.8 per cent on Monday.
The Institute for Supply Management's services survey slipped to 54.9 in September, still comfortably in growth. Its prices index rose to 74, the highest since July 2022. Half of the purchasing managers surveyed paid more for what they buy; 2.2 per cent paid less. All 17 industries that reported a change in prices reported an increase.
Schneider Electric agreed on Sunday to buy PTC, the Boston maker of design and product-lifecycle software, for $205 a share in cash, valuing its equity at about $22.6 billion. That is 42.3 per cent above Friday's close, and 5 per cent below PTC's peak close in August 2025. The French group will borrow most of the money, sell up to €6 billion of new shares and pause its buyback for two years. Its shares fell about 10 per cent in Paris.
The fiscal year closed on Wednesday with a record $332.6 billion of customs deposits, according to the Treasury's daily cash statement. It also closed with $157.8 billion paid out through Customs and Border Protection, against about $10.5 billion in each of the two previous years. Net of those payments, the border raised less than it did in fiscal 2025. Since May, it has paid out $17.5 billion more than it took in.
In the year to September, US employers added 496,000 jobs. Health care and social assistance added 520,000, so the rest of the economy together lost jobs. Measured over 12 months, that has been true every month since June 2025. In payroll data back to 1990, the only comparable stretches came around recessions.
General Motors sold 670,974 vehicles in the US in the third quarter, down 5.5 per cent. Toyota sold 633,223, up 0.6 per cent, and more than half of them were hybrids or other electrified models. Hyundai Motor Group finished 1,195 vehicles behind Ford. The automakers gaining share are the ones with cheap cars and hybrids, in a quarter when gasoline cost $1.35 more than a year earlier.
At least 16 trucking and delivery companies entered bankruptcy between late August and 21 September, FreightWaves found. Seven of them ran six trucks or fewer. Diesel hit a record $6.53 a gallon in the same weeks, but spot freight rates have also risen, from about $2.40 a mile a year ago to $3.42. The squeeze on small carriers is less about the price of fuel than about when they have to pay for it.
Spot rates for a 40-foot container from the Far East to the US West Coast were $8,346 on 1 October, Xeneta said, up 344 per cent since 28 February. To the East Coast they were $11,523. The same box to northern Europe cost $3,726, and that price has been falling since July. Xeneta's chief analyst says the US rates have now peaked, but will not collapse.
The September jobs report added 29,000 jobs and cut 60,000 from the two months before. Inside it, insurance carriers and the businesses around them lost jobs for the 11th month running. They now employ about 90,000 fewer people than in May 2025, a faster fall than in any comparable stretch in data going back to 1990. In the industry's own hiring survey, carriers keep saying the opposite.
Caterpillar said on Wednesday it will invest about $1 billion in a new plant in Sanford, North Carolina, to build more compact track loaders and telehandlers. Lee County and the City of Sanford have approved up to $85.5 million in incentives. The condition is that the company keeps at least 1,950 full-time jobs. It will not add any beyond the 600 hired this year.
The hires rate has sat between 3.1 and 3.5 per cent every month since March 2024, a pace last seen outside the pandemic in 2013. Quits are at 1.9 per cent. Yet real consumer spending rose 0.6 per cent in August while real disposable income did not grow, and the saving rate fell to 4.1 per cent. This week's data describe a labour market that has stopped moving and households that have kept spending anyway.