The rise of the borderless trustbuster

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…