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Bill Radke: We have not heard too much this last year or so about companies gobbling up other companies. But in the last couple of days, there’s been a little flurry. Is it a sign of more to come? Marketplace’s Alisa Roth reports.

Alisa Roth: Xerox is buying an outsourcing company for more than $6 billion. At the same time, the drug company Abbott Laboratories says it’s buying a Belgian pharmaceutical. And that’s just today.

Bob Teitelman: It’s better than last year, when nothing was happening.

Bob Teitelman is editor of The Deal. He says these multibillion-dollar deals are strategic ones. with one big company buying up another one.

But he says private equity firms aren’t buying much, and it’s still hard to raise money to buy things. He thinks it’s much too soon to say that the market for mergers and acquisitions is back.

Teitalman: You gotta take the longer view of these things. A few deals, even five or six deals, it’s better than having, you know, absolutely nothing going on out there. But we’re not back into the 2006, 2007 period by any means.

Teitelman says high stock prices are actually making a lot of companies too expensive to buy. And that the rest of the economy will have to pick up before we see a real buying frenzy again.

In New York, I’m Alisa Roth for Marketplace.