FCC Chair Nixes Sirius-XM Merger Concept

NEW YORK Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin signaled that the FCC would not support a Sirius-XM merger, making it clear that regulations created when the service was conceived more than a decade ago clearly state that “two satellite radio operators [must] remain in place.”

Dreams of such a union were in large part created by the vivid and overworked imaginations of a slew of Wall Street analysts, who have been bouncing merger theories off each other, both firm-to-firm and in weekly, sometimes daily, notes to investors, for months, without much regard for regulatory Washington.

While