It was to be the biggest industrial merger ever. In late 2000 General Electric (ge), the world’s most valuable company at the time, agreed to pay $43bn for Honeywell, a smaller American manufacturer of, among other things, aircraft electronics. Jack Welch, ge’s ceo and America Inc’s capitalist-in-chief, put off his retirement to see it through. The transaction, codenamed “Project Storm”, seemed a done deal. American authorities gave their blessing, finding no threat to competition (ge made jet engines but not avionics). Regulators elsewhere were expected to defer to America in a merger involving two American firms. So it came as a shock when, in 2001,
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