Still, it's difficult to see a clear path to a profitable exit for TPG in a sector where people matter more than financial engineering.
Smaller firms reply that the industry's bread and butter is turning around unsexy family firms, not using ever more complicated financial engineering to make trophy acquisitions.
Unsurprisingly, downtrodden and outsourced workers, mis-sold-to customers, exploited suppliers and underpowered innovation cancelled out any gains from ever more ingenious financial engineering – leaving shareholders less well off in the shareholder-value-era since 1980 than in previous decades.
Catherine J. Arnold, senior pharmaceuticals analyst at Credit Suisse, wrote to investors on Friday to say an Abbott-Solvay deal would add to Abbott's earnings, but that it was "more like financial engineering" by using cash to buy revenues.
BT Retail, for its part, should gain a new freedom to bring innovative applications and services to market.Just as with AT&T's recent decision to split itself up, much depends upon whether BT will really give the new spin-offs truly independent managements, or whether this is more about financial engineering.
The old BTR was on a roll while markets were buoyant and inflation ensured that it could bump up product prices year after year; and as long as lax acquisition accounting procedures helped to mask the fact that the business owed more to financial engineering than commercial logic.
In contrast, many of the takeovers for the last five years were based on little more than financial engineering, with lax lenders providing low-interest debt to help private equity firms buy companies that they often planned to resell quickly in hopes of pocketing a fast profit.
Critics of the deal say that it's more about financial engineering than drug development.
Catherine Arnold, the pharmaceuticals analyst at Credit Suisse, says it is more about financial engineering, using cheap cash to buy out a firm Abbott now pays royalties to for a lucrative heart franchise.
No matter which of these or other options the company may choose, if AT&T embarks on a major restructuring, Mr. Armstrong risks the deeper criticism that he is more concerned with financial engineering than with actually managing his business.
