Pierre Pourquery, of Boston Consulting Group, says it is not uncommon for investors to break their exotic purchases into smaller pieces in order to feed them into their risk-management systems.

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Mr. COLE: Of course another option ultimately for the owners of Chrysler is to break it up into pieces.

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The corporate entities for which these people work also tend to break up into smaller pieces or get merged into larger ones.

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Traveling through the sky at a few kilometers per second, friction with the air can cause the meteor to break up into several pieces.

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Instruments are passed through the scope to break up the stone into small pieces that can be urinated out.

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If you know what your aims are you can begin to break each aspect down into manageable pieces which will seem more achievable.

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American officials are reluctant to go nuclear and break them up, not least because the task of splitting them into pieces small enough to pose no danger would be horribly messy.

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But unlike the other Maiden Lane assets already sold by the Fed, the Triaxx CDO is more of a notorious villain of the 2008 financial crisis and may present more of a challenge for banks looking to break it up and sell it off in pieces.

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What if it was possible to break a complex piece of machinery into a thousand pieces and then, at some predetermined moment, have the machine put itself back together again?

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The idea was that new chief executive Ian Read would break the company up into five pieces so that the drug division would be able to grow from a smaller base.

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