Vanguard buying iShares, Jim? You have got to be kidding.

Your blog post on the topic smacks of desperation. The deal would "give Vanguard scale with intermediaries"? Please. Vanguard's already building a nice intermediary business with its portfolio of 39 ETFs, thank you very much, and they don't want/need another 150 products to sell.

The challenge of rationalizing those product lineups would be immense, and the numbers just don't work for me. And as you so rightly point out, the ultimate question is how such a deal would benefit existing Vanguard shareholders, who own the firm. The answer is it wouldn't.

What would make more sense—and something that Dave Nadig and I discussed briefly on our weekly podcast—is for Vanguard to swoop in and pick up the pieces of BGI after someone else carves out the iShares brand. The core BGI business would fit nicely into the Vanguard model, and help give it increasing scale and heft.

But iShares? Sorry.

BTW: By my calculations, the "go-shop" window for BGI ends two weeks from today. Barclays promises an update at that point.

Also: Impressive first day for Pimco's new ETF, trading 300K shares. Whether it can hold that volume remains to be seen, but it shows that people are taking Pimco's entry into the ETF space seriously.