The nation, it has to be said, is not in mourning for BAA. It is hard to imagine the French letting Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to slip into foreign ownership, and impossible to think of JFK in New York or Los Angeles airport being out of American hands. But Heathrow and Gatwick? Nobody cares.
We're not even bothered whether the new owner is an indebted Spanish construction company, with a Canadian pension fund and the state of Singapore in tow, or a Wall Street investment bank and its friends.
This is a healthy attitude - up to a point. It is certainly true, as Gordon Brown was arguing the other day, that economic patriotism is a small step from protectionism, which is a road to ruin. In this case, there are also specific reasons to be relaxed. Heathrow cannot be relocated to Madrid, and BAA, at least for now, is a regulated company.
But there is still something unsettling about the way BAA gave up - or was obliged to give up - the fight for independence. It is what it says about the short-term perspective of our pension fund managers. Heathrow, which accounts for almost half BAA's passenger traffic, will be around in 30 years. For pension funds, searching to match long-term assets to long-term liabilities, BAA ought to be a buy-and-forget stock. Yet Ferrovial is willing to pay 49% more than the old stock market price. It is, in effect, saying the market was undervaluing BAA by an enormous margin.
Ferrovial might have miscalculated but there is a trend here. P&O, the ports business, went for a previously unimaginable price and AB Ports looks as if it will also. There are two interpretations: either UK infrastructure assets were seriously cheap or UK pension funds, the natural owners, know something the foreign bidders do not.
We will have to wait a few years for the definitive answer but the smart money is on the foreigners. We have been here before. In the 1990s Guy Hands made UK stock market professionals look mugs by generating small fortunes for himself and his then employer, the Japanese bank Nomura, from dull assets others had overlooked - everything from trainleasing companies to pubs to former Ministry of Defence homes.
The quality and security of the cashflows was a Hands mantra, just as it is with the current buyers of infrastructure. In many cases, such as William Hill, Hands-backed companies eventually found their way on to the stock market, where pension funds happily paid prices they would have declared absurd a few years before.
Don't be surprised if BAA's flightpath follows a similar course, particularly if the Competition Commission calls for a break-up of the south-east monopoly. The same pension funds that declined to buy BAA at 600p would probably now queue to buy an independent Gatwick-Stansted plc. For Ferrovial, if it is paying more than it expected, that is a very useful get-out-of-jail-free card.
Early winner
Free Broadband Forever is a bit of a lie (you still have to pay for your telephone call package) but it's a hell of a marketing line. The response to Carphone Warehouse's campaign has been so strong that the ads have been curtailed.
The figure of 340,000 broadband customers in eight weeks was roughly double what the City expected. The ultimate target was supposed to be 1.8 million customers by 2009 but, on this form, Carphone will achieve that well ahead of schedule.
Rivals grumble that the marketing slogan is unfair but the damage, for them, has been done. Carphone nipped in first and picked up the low-hanging fruit. If the competitors were in a position to have performed the same trick, they would have done so.
It illustrates once again how Carphone has become a company that defies predictions of its downfall. At its flotation six years ago, the worry was that the big mobile operators would seek to claw back the profit that was being lost via independent retailers.
Instead, Carphone has captured about 40% of the independent market and made its shop windows a critical battleground for the handset manufacturers. Yesterday's excitement over the broadband numbers should not disguise the fact that the core retail business enjoyed a 38% rise in profits and looks as if it is a very long way from maturity.
Life for Carphone in broadband, surely, must get tougher. Sky, given that it already has a customer base of eight million, should be able to compete effectively on price. BT will react more aggressively once 1.5m lines have passed into the hands of competitors - that may be around Christmas.
But Carphone clearly anticipated such responses. It is why it went early with its offer. The cost is the current congestion in its call centres but it was the correct business decision.
