Blockbuster’s bid for Circuit City may herald an early return to the silly season, so we thought it would be a good time to look back at the last five years of mergers and how shareholders have fared. Our soon-to-be siblings at Thomson crunched the numbers since 2003 and found that fewer than half of the 45 deals done have been positive for the acquirers’ shareholders. Remember, most of these deals were done with the period of private equity madness still ahead, and the threat of recession hardly considered a possibility.
(Photo: The Economist)

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