An alternative to all-out mergers, suggested by Jean Dermine, a professor at Insead, a business school near Paris, is to form a co-operative venture with foreign banks.
They may also point out that mergers are no substitute for finding new reserves an activity the mining giants have neglected in recent years.
Lawyers are already speculating that some companies will attempt to use the attack as an excuse to back out of mergers or other business deals.
Higher interest rates seem to be having an impact, but so too are plans that haven't worked out and mergers that failed to produce synergies, says Daniel Gates, who wrote the Moody's Report.
The market hasn't yet sorted out all the mergers and acquisitions in the financial sector.
Mr Condit refuses to rule out transatlantic aerospace mergers, although he notes that firms may find it easier to form alliances or joint ventures instead.
Specifically, how many companies have never merged, and how much efficiency and innovation have we lost thanks to companies shying away from mergers out of fear of the federal government?
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It may benefit further from highly complex new financial regulations that will drive smaller, regional competitors either out of business or into mergers with the megabanks.
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Hurd had taken HP to the biggest tech company in the world, an arguable contender against both IBM and Cisco, and a model for the rest of the industry about the right way to do mergers and carry out efficient execution.
Politicians will not dismantle the single market, but there is a lot they can do to meddle: doling out state aids, encouraging mergers and alliances to create national or European "champions", and taking an aggressive stance on foreign imports through things like anti-dumping complaints.
Ofcom also set out guidelines to determine whether newspaper mergers should go ahead.
In Thailand, where the Crisis began, "the economy hasn't really come around and won't until banks and property companies get sorted out, " says a Thai mergers and acquisitions expert.
But Comcast is now looking beyond grinding out operating efficiencies and adding customers through mergers.
But, the consultants point out, few Western multinationals have a mergers-and-acquisitions team in Delhi or Shanghai that can draw up a shopping list.
Laster expresses some support for lawyers who sue over mergers, saying they are out to make money but can also serve as watchdogs over management.
Retail experts say there are too many stores chasing too little money - and the need to strip out this excess capacity will lead to more mergers, take-overs or even outright closures.
Past bank mergers, the panel said, bailed out weak banks by making the strong ones feeble.
As for venture capitalists who sunk their money in them, well, they are looking to mergers and takeovers to get their investments out.
But 1974 was a tough year on Wall Street as retail investors bailed out of the market, producing a string of mergers and bankruptcies.
These options have now been ruled out for Thames Valley but, in future, mergers and takeovers should not be regarded as the last resort: it may well be the best and quickest solution for an ailing university to be absorbed by another with successful courses, high standards, good management and a strong image.
The trick of Daimler and Chrysler, and of the mergers to come, will be to throw out the nationalism of car making, while keeping its nationality.
Once these startups scale into full-fledged profitable businesses, another trend in the market is for founders to turn to mergers and acquisitions as an option to cash out.
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These enormous emissions of energy occur when black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs collide - the galactic mergers take just seconds, but they send out a vast wave of radiation.
He insists that he is fully aware of the need for speedy integration, and points out that he is a veteran of two other successful mergers, one of which produced Duke Energy, one of America's biggest electricity firms.
Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch stands out as a testament to a central problem in many failed mergers.
Unfortunately the companies did not move fast enough, and both NTL and Telewest, the companies that emerged out of the round of business failures, takeovers and forced mergers, were bankrupt by the end of the process.
Maybe, if they're ready to ride out the systems integration and culture clashes that have historically complicated airline mergers.
NatWest will not say whether a divestiture is in the works, but it has hired Lazard Brothers, a mergers-and-acquisitions specialist, to help sort out its investment-banking strategy.
The government aims to reduce the number of rural students who drop out or migrate to urban areas because of village school closures and mergers, China Daily reports.
In taking these personnel decisions in advance, Mr Harrison is applying lessons learned working for his predecessor, Walter Shipley, in the mergers of the 1990s that created today's Chase out of Manufacturers Hanover, Chemical, and the old Chase, best known as the Rockefeller family bank.
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