THE conception, the fight, the strategy and the ultimate abandonment of BHP Billiton's bid for Rio Tinto will be the subject of autopsy for a long time to come.
The first of these was the centrepiece of the speeches by BHP chairman, Don Argus, and chief executive, Marius Kloppers, at yesterday's annual meeting.
While there has already been scalp hunting from around the globe directed at BHP's board and management, it's hard to escape the company's logic that this was a marriage made in commercial heaven and that one day it will be revisited.
It's also hard to dispute that when this process started in earnest some 18 months ago, the economics were compelling.
Some of the critics are focusing on the fact that the BHP Billiton board took the naive view that it could get this deal through anti-trust regulators around the world with little damage and that this was both unrealistic and arrogant.
We know that the European authorities had a competition issue with iron ore and coal dominance but we don't know the extent to which divestments would ultimately have been required to satisfy their concerns.
But this was not the central reason the bid was dumped. Argus was clear that even without "remedies", the board would have moved to scotch the bid.
If BHP Billiton is to be criticised, it would be for holding on too long and not reading the signs that its world was changing along with the rest.
It's too easy to say that nothing that has taken place over the past year was not foreseeable.
There are plenty of people, for example, that cashed out of stockmarkets a year ago.
And there are some businesses, admittedly not that many, which picked that economies around the world were feasting on leverage in a way that was unsustainable, and fortified their own balance sheets accordingly.
But BHP, and Rio for that matter, took a far too optimistic view of their own position, even up to a month ago.
As world growth was deteriorating - and despite the fact that the United States was in serious decline and the evidence was mounting that Europe was rapidly following it - these companies were of the belief that the nourishment provided to them by the emerging markets of China, and to a lesser extent India, would give them immunity from the debt virus and all its side effect that had infected the rest of the world.
It stuck to the view, which was swallowed by plenty, that China's internal growth momentum was sufficient to isolate it from the rest of the world economy.
This view was about completely ignoring the influence of US demand on its trading partners. This scenario saw globalisation in a somewhat warped way.
Australia embraced this logic because it either knew no better or willed it to be true. Such a view seemingly got us off the hook as well.
The BHP management still saw the financial crisis as someone else's problem when it it delivered its full year results in August but it is now having to face the reality that world commodity prices have fallen in a massive slump and that the 17 per cent decline in Chinese steel production will flow through to BHP's iron ore demand and price.
BHP now describes the current environment as challenging, with short-term uncertainty, and admits that it will not be immune.
The good news for BHP is that the commodities boom which it has ridden for the past couple of years has put it in a particularly strong position to weather the downturn, be it short-term or longer.
Had it been successful in its bid for Rio, BHP would be carrying an onerous debt burden and faced with the need to sell assets into a poor market.
The whole exercise has cost the company $450 million - which is nothing to be sneezed at. Rio, however, was not so lucky. It has retained its independence but its poison pill is very costly.
