They got a market; we got a market

After years of relative inactivity compared to the U.S., the European markets for public capital have become a beehive of activity. Whether that activity will prove to be synergistic - or whether competing capital markets will divide the business into such small parcels that each alone is unviable, probably won't be known for several years.

With EASDAQ finally embarked on trading (see Ebb & Flow, A8), European investors now have a genuinely transnational trading body, with a new entrant waiting in the wings - a proposed consortium of national markets modeled on Paris's Nouveau Marche...