Bank of New York, which was founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury secretary, knows that hostile acquisitions are rarely able to use an accounting process known as pooling, which is much kinder to the profitability of the combined firms than the alternative acquisition accounting.

ECONOMIST: Buy, buy

But everybody knows that pooling-of-interest accounting, which tends to inflate reported earnings after a merger, helped encourage the conglomerate craze of the late Sixties, and that changing those rules made conglomeration much less attractive.

FORBES: Why Everybody's Jumping On The Accountants These Days

All this is especially troubling, because financial firms will be keen to get into businesses from which they were previously excluded and quickly, because an accounting trick known as pooling of interest, which flatters the profits of the merged entity, will be scrapped at the end of next year.

ECONOMIST: Killing Glass-Steagall