Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

There is a selling frenzy on Wall Street. Not of stocks but of businesses-and in the dramatic cases of Bear Stearns and last month Merrill Lynch, entire firms.

Mergers and acquisitions, of course, are a mainstay of life on Wall Street. But in this period of economic turmoil, as firms desperately try to raise capital to offset losses and write-downs brought on by the ongoing financial crisis, or to jettison those businesses that may in fact be harmful to them, they have been shopping portions of