Corporate fashions come and go, and this season's is industrial breakups. In America and Europe, once-sprawling conglomerates are being carved up into focused companies that investors hope will fare better on their own. Those banking on quick returns have mostly been disappointed. Conglomerates thrived in the 1970s, and made a comeback after the merger frenzy of the late 1990s. They are beloved of megalomaniac bosses keen to prove they can run empires peddling anything from train carriages to CT scanners (as Siemens currently does, albeit not, as it announced last week, for much longer). But the argument that diversity lets a firm's healthy arms prop up temporarily frail ones is, once again, losing ground in the rich world.
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