If investors are to believe John Thain’s pledge that Merrill Lynch will not need to raise any more equity, then asset sales must be in the offing. Merrill is set to report another big swathe of writedowns next Thursday as it presents second-quarter results. The bank’s 20 per cent stake in Bloomberg is rumoured to be on the block. How much might it fetch?

The privately held financial data provider is notoriously opaque, so valuations are finger-in-the-air stuff. The only hard reference point is that Merrill sold a third of its interest – equivalent to a 10th of the equity – to Bloomberg in 1996 for $169m. It is also helpful to know that rival ThomsonReuters has a current enterprise value of $34bn, with its markets business – albeit not exactly comparable – accounting for about half of operating profits.