Dollar General said on Monday that it was offering $8.9 billion to buy Family Dollar Stores in an effort to break up its Family Dollar’s planned merger with Dollar Tree, DealBook’s Michael J. de la Merced writes. Under the terms of the deal, Dollar General would pay $78.50 a share in cash, significantly higher than the $74.50 a share that Dollar Tree’s original cash-and-stock bid was worth when it was announced last month. Including debt, Dollar General’s offer is valued at $9.7 billion. The emergence of the unsolicited takeover bid sets up a potential battle over the fate of Family Dollar, which has been under pressure from the activist investors Carl C. Icahn and Nelson Peltz. A combined Dollar General-Family Dollar would have almost 20,000 stores and more than $28 billion in annual revenue. Dollar General also expects to generate $550 million to $600 million of cost savings.

BANK CONSULTANT FACES PENALTY | The giant consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, entrusted with acting as a shadow regulator of some of the world’s biggest banks, has now landed in the regulatory spotlight for obscuring some of the same misconduct it was supposed to unearth, DealBook’s Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg write. Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York State’s top financial regulator, is set to announce a settlement with PricewaterhouseCoopers, which involves the firm’s work for the Japanese banking giant Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. Mr. Lawsky will impose a $25 million penalty against PricewaterhouseCoopers and prevent one of its consulting units from taking on certain assignments from New York-regulated banks for two years. The firm, which is accused of lacking the objectivity and integrity expected of consultants but not actually breaking the law, agreed to pay the fine and accept the two-year sidelining of its regulatory consulting unit, Mr. Protess and Ms. Silver-Greenberg write. Regulators had long suspected Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi of routing money through its New York branches on behalf of nations blacklisted by the United States. The bank hired PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2007 to quantify its improper transactions with Iran and other sanctioned countries. The firm’s initial draft of the report about the bank’s transactions acknowledged certain limitations of its examination and highlighted how the bank had stripped out the names of Iranian clients to avoid detection. But the firm then modified the draft, deleting some of the harshest characterizations and diluting others. The bank’s effort to sanitize the report “offers a lens into Wall Street’s multibillion-dollar consulting industry and the conflicts of interest that plague it,” Mr. Protess and Ms. Silver-Greenberg write. “Conflicts are inherent to its business model: Consultants are handpicked and paid by the same banks they are supposed to examine.”

SILICON VALLEY TAKES DEALS IN-HOUSE | Silicon Valley’s biggest corporate acquirers, like Google, Facebook and Cisco Systems, are increasingly leaning on their internal development teams to handle deals instead of relying on Wall Street’s investment banks, DealBook’s David Gelles writes. The acquiring company did not use an investment bank in 69 percent of American technology acquisitions worth more than $100 million this year, up from 27 percent 10 years ago. Such recent transactions include Apple’s $3 billion deal for Beats Electronics and Facebook’s $2.3 billion purchase of the virtual reality company Oculus VR. “The diminished reliance on investment banks comes as technology deal-making is booming,” Mr. Gelles writes. “At the heart of the disconnect between technology companies and banks is the belief among many tech executives that some advisers simply do not know what companies like Google and Facebook are looking for.” For example, Facebook uses acquisitions to make big bets on the future and plug technical holes. And the same was true for Google’s $3.2 billion deal for Nest, the home monitoring company, which gave Google an entry to a potentially huge new market. Mr. Gelles writes: “While traditional investment banks might not be comfortable suggesting that clients pay such startling prices for relative unknowns, many big tech companies have built up robust corporate development departments designed to do just that. The teams are largely staffed by former bankers who have abandoned pinstripes and wingtips for T-shirts and sneakers.”

ON THE AGENDA | The National Association of Home Builders housing market index is out at 10 a.m.