Money talks, and what these mergers say is that the European and American economies are becoming one flesh, as the priests intone at religious ceremonies of marriage. The two great liberal capitalist economic systems have been in bed together for a long time and now the mergers of the great transatlantic stock exchanges represent the formal wedding.

Note that nobody is talking about any mergers with the Tokyo or Hong Kong or Mumbai exchanges, far less the weird casino with loaded dice that is the Shanghai market. Curiously, if there is one foreign exchange that has the financial control standards that could theoretically fit into the transatlantic system, it could be the new Dubai stock market, established by veteran watchdogs from London. But any mergers into the Persian Gulf markets are for the moment purely notional.

The transatlantic markets, like the transatlantic economies, are open, decently regulated and complementary. The International Monetary Fund publishes regular statistics of the amount of foreign direct investment in various countries as a proportion of their gross domestic product, which points to the extraordinary degree of openness that defines them.

Italy ranks relatively low on this scale, with FDI at 13 percent of GDP. Germany is rather better with 25 percent, Britain better still at 36 percent, but by this measure the most open big European economy is France, with 41 percent. (The U.S. level is about 32 percent.)

FDI is an important measure, not only of a society's openness to foreign ownership, but also because it is a better guide to the way modern economies work. If one looks purely at the trade figures, in which goods are made in country A and then packed up and shipped off at considerable expense to country B, than transatlantic trade seems to be in decline.

The raw figures for trade in manufactured goods across the Atlantic, running at around $600 billion a year, have been overtaken by the trade in good across the Pacific, which is now running at around $1,000 billion.

But that sort of trade is very 20th century. Look instead at the sales of wholly-owned subsidiaries of American companies in Europe, or European corporations in North America, and the 21st century pattern of trade becomes clear. Rather than making goods in country A and sending them to country B, a company from country A invests in buying the plant and labor in country B and makes its products right there in the local market, with local employees.

That is how the North American and European economies work these days, and by that measure, the total transatlantic trade is really running at over $2,500 billion a year. And it represents an economic system that is very nearly independent of nationality. With around half of their shareholders now American, it is not easy to say these days that companies like BP or BAE are British anymore in any meaningful sense, or whether Daimler-Chrysler is German or American.

To establish this kind of economic interdependence requires more than just money. It needs a great deal of trust in the legal and financial systems of the other jurisdiction, and a shared network of common standards and corporate values that transcends national boundaries. Such a system understands trade as a win-win game, rather than the traditional mercantilist pattern of Chinese trade with the United States with its massive $200 billion annual U.S. trade deficit.

The stock market mergers between New York and Europe reflect this emerging new reality of the transatlantic economy as a single system, whatever policy rows may be under way between the White House in Washington and the Elysee Palace in Paris.

The final outcome of the current bidding process is not yet clear. The NYSE with a market capitalization of around $10 billion, is offering a merger with Euronext, whose market cap is around $10.7 billion. Euronext includes the stock exchanges of Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon, plus the LIFFE futures market in London.

But Deutsche Borse, the German stock market in Frankfurt whose market cap is currently $14.4 billion, is also offering to buy Euronext and naturally hoping to get political support with the lure of a vast Euro-exchange.

A few years ago, that Euro-sentiment might have worked, but these days so many of the shareholders of Euronext and of the Deutsche Borse are British and American (who also have sizeable shares in the New York and London exchanges) that national or European loyalties do not speak as loudly as financial self-interest and logic. The single Atticus Capital hedge fund, for example, currently holds about 6 percent each of Euronext, the London and NY exchanges.

Monday's NYSE offer for Euronext comes one day before the deadline set by Euronext shareholders, who said last week that NYSE has until Tuesday to make a firm offer or they would vote to merge with Deutsche Borse. This may be an idle threat.

Euronext and the Germans have been negotiating for months, with the enthusiasm of the shareholders on both sides dampened by the cool relations between the respective managements, above all by the French, who see themselves playing second fiddle to the Germans.

This might be eased, now that the Milan stock exchange has signaled its readiness to do a deal with Euronext, which is already far bigger than Deustche Borse both in trading volumes and in market capitalization of its listed companies. But then both of them are dwarfed by the London Stock Exchange, which currently seems to be joining with NASDAQ.

So the likely outcome is now for two competing transatlantic groups, NYSE and Euronext against London and NASDAQ, with each of them looking eventually to compete to swallow Deutsche Borse -- unless the Chicago boys from the mercantile exchange and futures groups decide to join the game. This competition is likely to mean lower transaction costs for the giant pool of transatlantic investors, even as the common trading systems facilitates more transatlantic mergers and corporate partnerships.

Between them the EU and North American economies currently account for almost half of the world's economic output, almost two-thirds of its trade and even more of its available investment capital. The coming of a common stock exchange and financial market means that the two 900 pound gorillas of the global economy are about the become an 1800 pound King Kong.

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