The Deutsche Bรถrse, the marketplace for the perhaps more familiar sounding DAX (Deutscher Aktien IndeX), is in acquisition talks to take over a controlling share of the New York Stock Exchange. Though the deal may inspire some resistance politically and with cartel-considerations, the impending sale seems to me like a last, desperate attempt to revitalize American stocks with a mortgage that is already over one's head, rather than a consolidating of power and control.
Like anything in large amounts, this concentration of trading certainly has impetus but the equally cavity-causing mob of debt and poisonous liabilities are likewise influential. Making financial hardships diffuse makes it more palatable and opaque. Together in a ten-billion euro quiver, some frantic business can gain legitimacy and even the appearance of value, besides in the swapping. A unified front for managing trades and protection for minority-interests in a monopoly are important and should be weighed against each other, but foremost, I believe, that the German titans of industry should take a close look at what they are committing to. Merging marketplaces makes former paying clients overseas into partners, scouts for new customers. Compared to the sedate and efficient, post-modern Star Trek look of the German Stock Exchange, the NYSE, noisy, crowded, and littered, looks like a scene one would find at the greyhound races.
