DEBORAH MARCHINI, CNN ANCHOR: It looks like General Electric's $40 billion acquisition of Honeywell is going to be delayed. For the reasons why, we go to Ed Crooks of the "Financial Times" in London -- Ed.</s>ED CROOKS, ECONOMICS EDITOR, "FINANCIAL TIMES": Hi, good morning. Yes, that's right. Well, it's another case of the European Union getting involved here. The European Commission said it's going to launch an inquiry into, as you said, that 40 billion pound deal. Mostly, it says, because of worries about competition in the aircraft market, essentially aircraft components market. And here we have GE, a huge supplier of aircraft engines, the biggest in the world and so on. And also Honeywell, very big in the area of avionics aircraft electronics. And the argument is or that the worry is the they might be able to sell -- a merge company might be able to sell these things, the engines and the avionics as a package, and not shop other companies out of the market. And we don't actually know who's been complaining of this. But we're pretty sure the companies like Rolls Royce, the engine supply United Technologies, of course, and Pratt & Whitney, another big engine company and so on, would've been very, very unhappy about this prospect of the GE-Honeywell merger. And they've been urging the European Commission to take an interest. The European Commission, of course, is getting increasingly active in these kind of big deals. For instance, they blocked the WorldCom-Sprint deal last year. So they're now becoming a pretty significant force in international competition policy that could potentially have pretty big implications, we think, for the GE- Honeywell deal.</s>MARCHINI: That's definitely. Ed Crooks from the "Financial Times," thank you.
'Financial Times': EC To Launch Inquiry Into GE-Honeywell Merger