>Does this have anything to do with The Phallus ?
Actually you have to wonder. I review the largely poor record of mergers over the last 100 years in Wall Street, but mergers persist nonetheless. I'm not sure how far I'd like to take this, but surely there's some aspect of the lust for size is phallicized. Market penetration and all that, don't you think? Ditto the hunger for money. Harvey quotes Simmel: "money enlarges the diameter of the circle in which our antagonistic psychic drives flourish."
Doug