TRANSCRIPT
The Swiss Exchange completes its Spanish acquisition. London Stock Exchange could be on the receiving end of a mega antitrust review. While the Hong Kong exchanges are celebrating 20 spectacularly successful years as a public company on their own market. Exciting technology news as serial entrepreneur, Nils-Robert Persson returns to the parish and indeed, exciting news emerges from down under: could the Australian Stock Exchange actually be open to settlement competition? My name is Patrick L Young, welcome to the bourse business weekly digest: It's the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast.
Beginning with parish notes this week, plaudits to Hong Kong exchanges marking their 20th anniversary as a public company. That was a good day for markets and indeed we applauded this week to the US stock exchanges who brought their case against the totalitarian stupidity of the SEC with a penny pilot which threatened to leave US markets with “one nation two systems” as an experiment where as we know previous efforts by the SEC to push progress have brought us such gems of dysfunction as reg NMS.
As you will know if you're a weekly or indeed daily reader of the Exchange Invest Newsletter. Every edition begins with a little history lesson appropriate to the issue number. This week's podcast coincides with issue 1792. Of course, 1792 was the year when the highwayman Nicholas Pelletier became the first person executed by the guillotine in France. However, of more interest to the parish: under an American sycamore tree in Manhattan, New York 24 brokers and merchants signed the Buttonwood agreement Named after the tree, it read,
“We the Subscribers, Brokers for the Purchase and Sale of Public Stock, do hereby solemnly promise and pledge ourselves to each other, that we will not buy or sell from this day for any person whatsoever, any kind of Public Stock, at a less rate than one quarter per cent Commission on the Specie value and that we will give a preference to each other in our Negotiations. In Testimony whereof we have set our hands this 17th day of May at New York. 1792.”
Of course the modern NYSE has changed a bit since then (its inflection points curiously involve several key M&A events but that Buttonwood tree was witness to one of the most powerful events in commercial history... and with it, it helped to create Exchange Invest, a couple of centuries down the line.
As I mentioned earlier, the appeals courts in the USA ruled in favor of the stock exchanges in their fee fight with the SEC. It's interesting to note the judges were appointed by, respectively, Presidents Carter, Obama and Reagan... not always a mix super conducive to disagreeing with regulators. After two strikeouts and a fortnight of legal actions, one is minded to ponder in the event of a third strike is the SEC out?. For perspective, we recalled this week in Exchange Invest Daily the powerful and poignant Stacy Cunningham Wall Street Journal opinion piece at the commencement of these proceedings brought by NYSE, NASDAQ and CBOE who were ”suing the SEC to protect the stock market.” It remains a very pertinent read to this day. And indeed, on CNBC the NYSE President Stacy Cunningham was discussing the reopening of her markets and in very, very measured tones she provided an overview and a background to the court ruling against the SEC and how in many other areas. relations are entirely cordial with the US regulator and the stock exchanges.
Over in Brussels, the EU eased some rules for foreign clearing houses as a sop to the United States of America thus ho...
