David Nicklaus: Last week, Jeremiah McWilliams and I did a chat about A-B and we were overwhelmed with questions. He's going to help me this week and we're going to try to get to as many as possible. I'll start things off by answering a couple of questions that we didn't get to last week. For instance, mattp202 asked, "Would there be any regulatory approval issues with a merger of this size?"

I don't think so, Matt. InBev's beers have only a tiny market share in the U.S., and Budweiser isn't very big in InBev's big markets of Europe, South America and Canada. So antitrust issues don't come into play, and we don't have any foreign-ownership limits for brewers like we have for airlines.

David Nicklaus: Another good question last week came from anrwright: "understand the point of business is the all mightly dollar, however when did it change from creating a business that was for the community. Why is that stockholders don't take into account the effect the company has on its employee's and community verus the dollars they would receive with a combined firm?"

There are plenty of successful companies that have combined making money for shareholders with community involvement. A-B has been one of those companies. If you take the long-run view, a company will be more successful if it's in an attractive community where it can recruit top-flight, well-educated workers. But the shareholders' interests always come first. If a company isn't making money for them, it loses its reason for being in business. The invisible hand of capitalism ensures that when capital isn't earning its highest possible return, someone else gets a chance to make better use of that capital.

David Nicklaus: We also didn't get to stnothum's question from last week: "Would Busch and the board have the ability to stipulate certain conditions that would benefit St. Louis in an agreement to sell (i.e. North American headquarters must be in St. Louis for ten years, St. Louis workforce could not be reduced by a certain amount, etc?)"

Yes, ST, they could extract such promises. However, they're often not worth the paper they're written on. Remember Macy's promise to keep a large division headquarters in St. Louis after it bought May Department Stores?

David Nicklaus: One more question from last week. Nick writes: "Many people aren't aware of this, but AB outsources a large amount of it's IT staff (currently over 1100 positions) to local and national IT resource placement firms. This allows AB leverage and liquidity to many positions, while giving a large number of local resource placement and consulting firms an oppurtunity to place clients and make money on those positions as well. If AB is taken over by Inbev, I would have to think those outsourced positions will be at the top of the chopping block. And that would appear to mean a huge number of local IT consulting firms will take a huge hit -- one that I'm certain will send a large number of them out of business. I for one am hoping AB stays independent and perhaps buys the remaining share of Modelo to thwart Inbev's takeover attempt."

Good question, Nick. I assume that if InBev were to buy A-B, they'd locate their North American headquarters in St. Louis. In such an operation, skilled IT staff would be one of their greatest needs. Now, all sorts of things could happen with the consulting firms you mention -- the company could decide to keep some and not others, or they could decide to consolidate all IT work with one bigger provider. There easily could be a lot of churn, and InBev does have a reputation for running lean, but I think we'd still end up with a large number of IT jobs there.

jeff: In you opinion do you think this merger/takeover will happen?

David Nicklaus: Good question, Jeff. (By the way, we're now answering questions submitted for this week's chat.) I really don't know. Where there's smoke, there's usually fire, and since the leaks about this deal are coming from sources close to InBev, I would guess that they'll make an offer. What happens then could be really interesting, but it sounds like A-B has some plausible defenses. And the financial markets are still rather jittery, so InBev may not be able to line up the reported $50 billion in financing that it is seeking.