Word: largest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hardly the only place where this is happening. The consolidation wave in banking began on Jan. 15 when Spain's Banco de Santander announced an $11.3 billion merger with crosstown rival Banco Central Hispano. This was followed by the $18 billion bid by Societe Generale, one of France's largest retail banks, with Paribas, the country's leading investment bank. During a sleepy Italian weekend in March, Unicredito, based in Milan, launched a $16 billion bid to buy northern rival Banca Commerciale Italiana, perhaps Italy's most prestigious banking brand. Only a few hours later, San Paulo-IMI, which...
...attempt to outmaneuver its rivals with a dramatic $37.6 billion offer to buy both Societe Generale and Paribas once their intended merger was announced, further jolting the French markets. If the BNP takeover ever goes through, it will create a bank with nearly $1 trillion in assets--Europe's largest--and give it an edge over the top U.S. bank, Citigroup, which currently has assets of $668.6 billion...
...shareholders have already earned a nice premium. Europe's cosseted work force, on the other hand, has not yet fully come to grips with what those investment banking euphemisms like "synergies" and "restructuring" can mean. As their American union counterparts discovered a decade ago, mergers will make Europe's largest firms more efficient and competitive, but they will do so by shedding thousands of jobs. And in Europe, where unemployment levels are more than twice as high as in the U.S., that could give new intensity to the term hostile takeover...
...robust economy. The industry enjoyed double-digit growth from the late '70s through the '80s. Wall Street, about as sentimental as a dollar bill, issued its own greeting to the industry recently: "Get lost soon." In a single day's trading in February, American Greetings, the nation's largest publicly owned greeting-card company, with $2 billion in annual revenues, lost $800 million in market value, tumbling 33%, to $23.25, after warning investors that dumping excess inventory would hurt near-term profits. Gibson Greetings' stock is limping along below $9, down from above $29 last year. (Industry leader Hallmark, with...
...Mormons consider genealogy part of their mission and have the world's most extensive records. "I think it is a wonderful site," says Michael Leclerc, reference librarian at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. "It is giving the most widespread access ever to the world's largest genealogical repository...