Even in these days of buccaneering takeovers and rampant private equity activity, bids like this don’t come along often. By size alone Barclays’ high-stakes bid for ABN Amro is the fourth-largest merger ever in Europe.
But its significance obviously goes far beyond mass. There are very few potential mergers left at this level of the banking community that have any prospect of getting past antitrust regulators. And strategically, the union could potentially create a bank in the global upper division across retail and wholesale lines, a holy grail so long unrealised for the industry that, despite the rise of Citi and post-Chase JP Morgan, it has been largely forgotten.
