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Keeping with the Dow Jones

Americans have made progress in reducing their addiction to smoking, but very little in cutting their consumption of oil.

Those are reasons enough for the keepers of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to change the makeup of the widely watched stock-market measure.

Gone are Altria Group Inc. and Honeywell International Inc. in favor of Bank of America Corp. and Chevron Corp.

Financials and energy were underrepresented in the Dow, the editors of the Wall Street Journal say. So they are dropping Honeywell - a Dow member since a predecessor joined in 1925 - because at $34.6 billion in sales it is the smallest of the industrials. No room for sentiment in a global economy.

Altria has always been a money machine, but its new, narrow focus - it spun off Kraft Foods in 2007 - doesn't suit the Dow, the Journal says.

The Philadelphia area doesn't lose much representation with the changes. New York-based Altria did buy cigar maker John Middleton Inc., of King of Prussia, for $2.9 billion in the fall. But Bank of America, of Charlotte, N.C., has a big presence locally.

Other Dow components with large operations in the region are Boeing Co., DuPont Co., Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. Inc.

- Mike Armstrong

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on February 12, 2008 12:18 PM.

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