Merrils value = A+B+C
A=their single prize jewel
B=All their other business
C=their net assets minus liabilities.

If A>A+B+C, then B+C<0

But the article says B<0

You are neglecting that their liabilities may exceed their assets.

The market has taken a hatchet to Lehman, certainly a drag across the financial spectrum, and the falling stocks have aided prices further, but the extreme areas bonds have been playing in are keeping a lid on things. The 10-yr ran up to knock the yield off to tag 3.57% (see 12:25 comment) but should get stuck, barring any big, bad headlines and with tomorrow’s calendar barren, the risk to treasuries will be to the downside. The curve was mixed with the benchmark 2-10-yr yield spread steepening while the 3-mo-10-yr flattened. Global bonds got a sympathy bid as players jumped on the safety band wagon. The 2-10-yr yield spread went out near the steepest levels since the Sunday night special bailout business, trading at 138.7 and likely to unwind further heading in to Wed.

I would think a black hole could be observed by a thin ring of light that has been gravitationally captured at almost the radius. The light may orbit many, many times before it escapes back out. In the meantime, it has taken on a coherency and intensity (by accumulation) that is proportional to its distance from the radius. It should be perfectly sharp and bright on the inside of the ring, and fall off in intensity and coherency from there.

FYI: The Schwarzschild radius (sometimes historically referred to as the gravitational radius) is a characteristic radius associated with every mass. It is the radius for a given mass where, if that mass could be compressed to fit within that radius, no known force or degeneracy pressure could stop it from continuing to collapse into a gravitational singularity.

> My interest in Schwarzschild has always been in wondering if the radius is on the inside or outside of the "black hole" i.e, it seems that the area associated with the mass is uniformly dimensional in two dimensions, but unable to account for containment of "the" field, i.e, if there is a black hole in the universe, then a black hole event can be observed from outside of that "event" — thus the radius of that space is not related to the space inside that event, in regard to the compression…

Nonetheless, the lack of dynamic transparency in this bottomless pit called wall street, is a jig saw puzzle that mixes reality and bits and pieces of fantasy into an illusion engineered into the latest market efficiency tricks that make the barriers of regulations and laws vanish — and obviously, when you have retarded crooks running around like lunatics at a circus, there has to be a name for this condition:

Megalomaniacs: A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence.

Are you calling a bottom?