The end of Wall Street

I've been surprised by the lack of reaction to news that Germany is taking over the New York Stock Exchange. Perhaps because it was portrayed as a merger, people don't realize it is a takeover, even though both NYT and WSJ spelled it out his morning?

It was a scandal back in the day when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center. Now the very symbol of American capitalism is being swallowed up by the Germans. Can people simply not get their heads around the idea that we are actually surrendering the temple to Money on Wall Street? The very building that gives Wall Street its meaning as the center of American finance?

Where is Michael Bloomberg bewailing the end of New York as a global financial center, upstaged by Frankfurt and even by London, which at least retains its primacy in its link with Toronto? Where is Chuck Schumer? Since when does a merger not mean a huge loss of jobs for the acquired company? And not just NYSE itself, but everyone who works in the securities business in New York. Wall Street vanishes and New York has no better claim on being the country's financial capital than Chicago or Boston or San Francisco, perhaps less so.

But wait, you say, the stock exchange will still be there. No, it won't. It's gone, subsumed into a German-controlled financial conglomerate that will ensure stock trading of American equities will become as deracinated from New York as Chinese equities.

But maybe this is all premature, and the deal will fall apart. Or Bloomberg and Schumer have weapons they have not yet deployed. Or that toothless old, uh, lady, the SEC, will put the kabosh on it. Doubtful.

So why aren't people reacting? Has the revulsion against Wall Street reached the point that everyone is thinking Good Riddance? Let Frankfurt worry about Goldman Sachs. The rich underwriting and trading culture that sustained Wall Street has long since vanished into the ether of online trading. The New York Stock Exchange resisted the transition to electronic trading for too long, and then came too late to ever recapture its lead. Or perhaps those jobbers knew what was afoot, and that the exchange was doomed from the moment Nasdaq opened its doors.

Congratulations to Deutsche Boerse. Who would have thought that a little company that used to occupy the attic offices of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange would one day cast its net across the Atlantic and across the continent. For Deutsche Boerse has now succeeded in capturing Euronext after all.

It also signals the victory of futures and derivatives over stocks and bonds, for that is the muscle that enabled Deutsche Boerse to take over the Big Board, which failed here as well to anticipate the future. End of an era.