STOCK EXCHANGE LETS FOREIGNERS PLAY
Just for the moment the scrummaging and jostling eased. A patter of applause ran around the exchange floor. A broker had pushed through another trade at an enviable price. The hurly burly started again. A minute later there was another burst of louder and more general clapping as a stock price hit a high. Then the blue-suited mauling started again. Brokers in their tiny boxes looked even more like bookmakers as they gesticulated to their colleagues on the exchange floor.
It's little wonder that the Tokyo Stock Exchange is open only four hours a day. Nobody could stand much more of its frantic yet strangely formal trading. It's a claustrophobic, noisy and distracting place, bursting with people. Yet the exchange will have to find the room to squash in another five members: the foreign houses which will follow Merrill Lynch on to the exchange later this spring.
Membership of the TSE is the biggest prize yet won by foreigners in Tokyo. It gives them status and halves the cost of equity dealing there. Together with the Ministry of Finance's increasing willingness to grant securities licences to foreign investment and merchant banks, it shows that Japanese authorities want to give foreigners at least the appearance of a chance in Tokyo.