CITY AND SUBURBAN
It's open season to bid for the Stock Exchange as the bold Swedes unfiX iX
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Imay bid for the London Stock Exchange myself. It must now be open season, and the £800 million on offer from the bold Swedes who call themselves OM can only be a sighting shot. You thought that stock exchanges were a preserved financial species? That the Exchange might exchange other people's stocks, but would never be brought face to face with a bid for its own? At the top of its charmless tower, its directors and managers may well have thought so too. They had set their hearts on a fuzzy deal with Deutsche BOrse of Frank- furt, to create a new exchange called iX. I distrusted it from the beginning: 'What suits the Exchange's directors and man- agers may not suit its customers and own- ers. They find it hard to believe that Lon- don and Frankfurt could make a union of equals, and they can see that the voting power, as well as the managerial force, must be concentrated at the other end.' iX, so I said, was a fiX, so let's hope it unstiX. Now the Swedes have marched in to unstick it, and the signal from Frankfurt is that Deutsche Borse would be ready to counter-bid, casting itself in the unlikely role of a white knight. A Teutonic Knight, surely? Other knights of various colours have been seen in the lists. As for the Exchange, it has some adjusting to do.
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