At the bottom of all this is the threat of a capital flight away from the western economies. How realistic is the threat, I don't know. Our governments have been fighting people who get residency in tax havens for a long time. Now it seems they're going to have to start fighting the "national champions'" desire to do the same.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman