This strategy has precedent, says David Risinger of Morgan Stanley, but the scale and structure of Pfizer's scheme is unmatched.

ECONOMIST: Drugmakers

Their shares trade at a discount to the other Italian banks because of their takeover-resistant structure, and they lack economies of scale.

ECONOMIST: Mutually assured destruction?

But its main purpose is serious: to reveal the large-scale structure of the universe and thus uncover what happened in the first billion-trillion-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang to cause things to turn out the way they did.

ECONOMIST: The Sloan star survey