Stocks Open Lower, Walgreen, Sprint plunge

U.S. stocks felll at the open on Wednesday after several key merger and acquisition deals fell through. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lately dropped 7.70 points, or 0.05%, to 16,421.77. The S&P 500 lost 2.02 points, or 0.11%, to 1,918.19. The Nasdaq Composite was down 6.34 points, or 0.15%, to 4,346.49.

The Walgreen Company said on Wednesday that it would pay about $5.27 billion in cash, plus shares, to acquire the rest of the British pharmacy chain Alliance Boots that it did not already own, but would keep its corporate headquarters in the United States.

Sprint dropped its bid for carrier T-Mobile U.S. after continued regulatory resistance despite months of lobbying. Sprint shares fell 17.5 percent and T-Mobile dropped 8.6 percent in heavy trading before the opening bell.

Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox pulled its $80 billion offer to buy Time Warner Inc that would have created one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. TWX shares slid 12.4 percent in premarket despite reporting better-than-expected results, while Fox rose 5.9 percent.

Time Warner reported second-quarter earnings of 98 cents a share, easily surpassing the expectations of Wall Street analysts. Time Warner also reported that its revenue for the period rose slightly to $6.8 billion, from $6.6 billion a year ago.

The trade deficit in the U.S. unexpectedly narrowed in June, reflecting the biggest drop in imports in a year as the economy moved closer to energy independence. The gap shrank 7 percent to $41.5 billion, the smallest since January, from May’s $44.7 billion, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington.