The Fed’s Open Market Committee will wrap up its December meeting today, and big [long-awaited, honestly this time] news on rates is expected by afternoon. Here’s your continuing coverage – NYTimes and WSJ [and your 5 things to watch] and Bloomberg
Dealbook’s Deal Professor breaks down the details of the Dow/DuPont merger and planned 3-way split, suggesting that “in today’s markets, financial engineering prevails and . . . only activist shareholders matter” – NYTimes
Valeant’s solution to its now-defunct mail-order pharmacy [Philidor]? It’s a distribution agreement at the corner of happy and healthy (if the ads are to be believed) – NYTimes and WSJ
NY Federal Judge Lorna Schofield has given preliminary approval of a $2 billion settlement between a group of 9 banks and investors over accusations of Forex manipulation – Law360
As we’ve been noting over the past weeks and months, 2015’s been a brutal year for hedge funds—not that you’d know it from the promises of “bigger and better” that fund managers are pitching to investors even now – NYTimes
The Treasury’s Office of Financial Research is out with a report suggesting that high-yield funds (like Third Avenue Mgmt) aren’t the only ones at risk these days—instead, it raises concerns about liquidity issues plaguing money market mutual funds and “stable-value” funds as well – WSJ
Meanwhile, Big Billy Gross is weighing in on junk bonds, too – Bloomberg
The Large Hadron Collider teams at CERN are at it again, and they may have uncovered a cousin to the Higgs boson—the “last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces”—that could [maybe] be a heavier version of the Higgs boson that would explain why other particles have mass or could even be a gravitron, the “supposed quantum carrier of gravity” – NYTimes
The review embargo has finally been lifted and the results are in . . . feel free to breathe a sigh of relief [or hum a tune], because it’s good! – NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg