DealZone

Manitowoc Co is set to be the third U.S. manufacturer dropped from the Standard & Poor’s 500 index this year — but the brains behind the benchmark said the shift does not reflect a desire to soft-pedal the sector. 

“Our general concern about sectors is the proportions of sectors in the market and the index should be close to one another, and close is around a percentage point or so,” said David Blitzer, an S&P managing director who chairs the index committee. “Given that the 500 is 75 to 80 percent of the total market cap of the U.S. market, we’re never going to be too far off.”

S&P said late on Monday that it would remove Manitowoc, a maker of cranes and ships, from the benchmark S&P 500 after the close of trading on Aug. 31, noting that its market capitalization ranked it last in the group.

Manitowoc will be replaced by Cardinal Health Inc spin-off, CareFusion Corp, a medical products company.

In March, Tyco International Ltd was dropped from the index, followed by Ingersoll-Rand Co in June. They were replaced by New England’s largest utility Northeast Utilities and utilities contractor Quanta Services Inc.

As if having the U.S. Justice Department on your back because your bankers may have been helping wealthy Americans avoid tax wasn’t enough, Swiss banking giant UBS also has to deal with grumpy regulators at home. The head of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, Daniel Zuberbuehler (pictured), tells us that singling out UBS and Credit Suisse for tough treatment is justifiable and has laid down a tight timetable for new rules to restrain the two. The banks will be required to hoard considerably more capital, which will surely slow them down on Wall St. On Monday, the DOJ said it had asked a federal court in Miami to authorize the Internal Revenue Service to request information from UBS about U.S. taxpayers who may be using Swiss bank accounts to evade federal income taxes. Coughing up tax fraudsters to the IRS could make the sell-off of UBS’s U.S. wealth management backbone – once known as Paine Webber – a tad trickier, but perhaps no less necessary.

A detailed blow-by-blow of the death of Bear Stearns by Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough casts current market rumors rumbling about the health of Lehman Brothers in an eerie light. The author, who DealBook notes co-wrote “Barbarians at the Gate,” takes aim at CNBC and hedge funds as it works to uncover what it posits could be the “murder” of the country’s fifth-biggest investment bank. This morning, CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino and DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin are talking about the prospects for Lehman being “taken out”.

High in the “priced to move” column, commercial lender CIT Group agreed to sell its home lending business to private equity firm Lone Star Funds for $1.5 billion in cash to increase liquidity, and said it would take a related second-quarter charge of $2 billion. CIT also agreed to sell its $470 million manufactured housing portfolio to Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance for about $300 million. “These sales complete our exit from all home lending businesses, removing the uncertainty surrounding this asset class,” Chief Executive Jeffrey Peek said. Lone Star will also be taking on $4.4 billion of outstanding debt and other related liabilities. Home lending may not be that far off the path for CIT, but getting out of the business certainly helped tax preparer H&R Block, which announced strong results and a better outlook yesterday, so any price is clearly worth it – CIT’s stock was up over 11 percent in premarket trade.