Sets on the brain
An emasculated former gentlemen's club, uncommunicative, uncooperative, dictatorial, slow to act and react, with a talent for wasting money and shooting itself in the foot: that's the common market view of the London Stock Exchange. The exchange rarely attracts positive comments even though its market capitalization, £1.25 trillion, it is more than twice the size of Deutsche Börse. It does, however, have some advantages over these bourses: English is finance's lingua franca, the City of London is Europe's major financial centre, and the LSE has a longer history of equities listing and trading. But these are hardly the result of recent hard work by the exchange's officials and members. Nor, until last month's sudden announcement of a joint venture with the Deutsche Börse, did many observers expect that anything would change soon. As with derivatives counterpart Liffe, the LSE appeared to be fighting a rear-guard battle...
