Wachovia and Wells Fargo merge

Wells Fargo signed the offer to buy Wachovia Corporation last night with no government backing in a stock-by-stock merger deal. Each Wachovia common stock share will be exchanged for 0.1991 of Wells Fargo common stock shares, which means a value of $7 per share under the Wells Fargo proposal, this share value is based on Wells Fargo’s closing stock price on October 2, 2008.

Citigroup had previously been in negotiations with Wachovia and the deal was to be supervised by the FDIC that included government assistants, however Wells Fargo was approved by Wachovia’s board last night.

This merger will mean that Wells Fargo and Wachovia Corp. will have assets of $812.4 billion and market capitalization of $33.5 billion this making it the one of the nation’s biggest diversified financial service companies.

Read the full article: WSJ