According to an ominous story on Bloomberg.com this morning, the recession is already here. It makes the argument that in many sectors of the economy, corporate profits were severely depressed in the third quarter.

In order to protect the bottom line, many companies have announced wholesale lay-offs in the tens of thousands. They are looking to every department to cut expenses and staff and often just eliminate entire departments. There is no doubt that this shake-out is happening because a day has not gone by in the past six months that we have not read about the falling dominoes of the economy.

The housing market, which was ripe with speculators and dreamers (of home ownership or huge profits) fueled by cheap financing which has disappeared, is now in full retreat. The depressed housing and credit markets were the first to show signs of weakness, followed by mortgage lenders who did not have to announce lay-offs, they just closed their doors. The home builders are not building, and the suppliers like Lowe's Co. (NYSE: LOW) and Home Depot (NYSE: HD) on the retail end and Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) and USG Corp (NYSE: USG) on the wholesale end are feeling it.

Whittling Away at the Dow has been my longest multi-part blog to date. This is the seventh and concluding post of the series and for those that have been following along I hope there has been something of value for you in my comments. Among my surprises have been that there was so much value still left in the Dow given it's reaching new highs almost daily; I was surprised Disney was among the stocks that made the cut, and I was surprised at how few comments I received. You might notice that all six stocks that made the cut were from the top half of the Dow 30, perhaps I became tougher as I went along, but that's how it worked out. If you want to read the previous posts the following links will get you there: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, or Part 6. So here we go, whittling the six down to three. Here are the stars:

• Alcoa Aluminum (NYSE: AA): Aluminum
• American International Group (NYSE: AIG): Insurance
• Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT): Heavy duty construction and mining equipment
• Disney (Walt) Company (NYSE: DIS): Entertainment production, media and theme parks
• Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM): Petroleum exploration, refining, and sales
• Home Depot (NYSE: HD): Retail and wholesale hardware and construction materials

In Part 1 of this series, I found two possible candidates for my Dow value picks, Alcoa Aluminum (NYSE: AA) and American International Group (NYSE: AIG). Here we review the next five DJIA stocks, searching for further value in light of the frequent new Dow highs. Lately, the Dow seems to be benefiting from the number of companies with growing international business, its higher than S&P average yields (2.3 vs 1.8 as a whole), and the safe haven nature of large caps in a precocious market.

AT&T (NYSE: T) -- Like most of the Dow stocks, T pays a high yield, currently 3.5%, and like the others it pays it consistently. This company is the aggregation of SBC, Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell, Bell-South, AT&T long distance and Cingular Wireless. It is the only one of today's five stocks that I have owned (separately as AT&T and SBC), but I do not own any shares of AT&T now and I do not care to. After all of the expansion done by mergers and acquisitions and only limited internal growth, I am not sure what the upside is.

How much pricing power will the new AT&T have, given ongoing competition in each segment of its business from other wireless carriers, cable television, and VoIP? Considering all of the recent M&A activity, it seems to have relatively low debt and huge cash flow. It also has a P/S, P/B, and P/CF in the lower range of most stocks. But a P/E over 20 is too high given that I do not see where future growth will come from. It seems to me for every competitive battle AT&T might win on one front they may lose an equal amount on another. All things considered, this stock seem fairly priced with limited near-term upside.