Where share trading takes place will be, as it has observably been in recent decades as London nicked the European business, determined by where people wish to trade shares, not by where the people who own the marketplace are.
Given this the only thing left to think about is who gets to decide who runs it?
And given that we’re talking about capitalism, that’s the people who currently own it and no one else.
Highest bidder wins and good luck to all who sail in her.
And if that bid or merger fails?
Anyone think that London is short of the capital to build a market upon which people can trade shares?
Assuming the current one doesn’t do very well?
Quite: perhaps we capitalists should be displaying just a little more faith in capitalism.
Tim,
the site isn’t taking comments so may I point out that who owns and therefore controls the computers *does* matter. There is no such thing as a computer system that cannot be corrupted by the guy in charge (99+% of computers are run by guys). And a bit before you started studying economics there was the example of the Railway Companies buying up Canals to prevent them competing. This may seem irrelevant and esoteric until you remember that the Germans slagged off AIM and tried to get it shut down because they claimed it had lower standards until Frankfurt’s Neuer Markt crashed and burned because its box-ticking bureasucracy did zilch to stop crooks and chancers (back in the day I did an analysis that showed, to my surprise, that Ofex had the lowest company failure rate, wiping out investors, among markets for small companies – which I attribute to it being run by John Jenkins who was the sort of guy you use to check plumblines).
IMHO, the argument is that there are risks to the deal but the ability to set up an alternative market limits them.
AIR, Adam Smith, in TWON, concedes that action is justified to prevent a mercantilist power (in this case Germany) destroying or controlling a free-trading nation’s major industries….