Article: When steel forged its first mega-deal.

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AST week's announcement of the creation of the world's largest steel-maker by Usinor of France fell, by a curious twist of fate, almost to the day on the centenary of an earlier steel-industry mega-merger - the formation of United States Steel Corporation, the largest merger relative to the scale of economic activity.

In 1901, US gross domestic product was $20bn, making US Steel's $1.4bn capitalisation equivalent to 7% of GDP. American GDP is now $10,000bn, meaning that an equivalent capitalisation would be around $700bn. That is double the size of the AOL-Time Warner merger which, when announced in January last year, was trumpeted as the world's ...

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