Jeremy Warner's Outlook: A potentially fatal blow for Deutsche's LSE bid

Currency instability

It's not been a good week for Werner Seifert, chief executive of Deutsche Börse. First a group of the London Stock Exchange's most important users expressed strong reservations about his takeover bid, citing concerns about Deutsche's vertically integrated structure which combines cash trading with settlement and clearing systems. Now the Financial Services Authority has expressed its own concerns. Since legal opinion is that the deal almost certainly requires the City watchdog's formal approval, Mr Seifert may just have hit an insurmountable block in the road.

Admittedly, the open letter published yesterday by Callum McCarthy, chairman of the FSA, was a carefully worded affair which could be given an entirely innocent interpretation. But this may be more down to the need under European law not to discriminate against bidders on grounds of nationality than anything else. Don't forget, Mr McCarthy says right at the start of his letter, that we allowed Santander's bid for Abbey without objection, so don't you go accusing us of being closed to foreign acquisition. Me thinks he protests too much and there's no mistaking the underlying tone of his letter.

Basically what he's worried about is the regulatory regime for British quoted companies shifting offshore to other jurisdictions. Mr Seifert has promised this will not occur, but as Mr McCarthy points out, it is impossible to be sure that in the long term the new company would chose to maintain its activities here.

Rather they might be provided as a "passported" service from elsewhere, presumably Frankfurt, which in turn could mean a significant change in the application of UK listing rules. The attractiveness of London as a financial centre depends on a system of corporate governance and regulation which is of high standard, but also proportionate, adaptable and attuned to the requirements of users. There is no knowing what might happen to it if it were shifted to Frankfurt. This might particularly affect AIM, which has built its success in attracting small and overseas companies to London's capital markets on the back of light touch, low cost regulation.

Deutsche was making light of Mr McCarthy's remarks yesterday, saying that all these concerns were being addressed in its proposals. But it seems to me that the intervention turns the already high chances of a Competition Commission investigation into a racing certainty. Mr McCarthy suggests that the takeover would perhaps be acceptable if the controlling company had its primary listing and domicile here in the UK, but the chances of the burghers of Frankfurt agreeing to that are about zero, this for the very same reasons as Mr McCarthy is concerned about a change of control at the LSE.

If Euronext's Jean-François Theodore is prepared to be more amenable, he's not yet said, but on the face of it, the FSA's concerns are as big a stumbling block for him as for Mr Seifert.

The LSE's share price will collapse if it turns out that the company is essentially bid proof, but the national interest, and that of its users and quoted companies, are probably best served by the market remaining independent.

John Thain, chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, was recently forced to deny that proposals to open for business a couple of hours earlier in the day were in response to the growing number of European companies that are trying to cancel their US listings. In fact, he said, it was aimed much more at the US domestic market, so that more instruments could be traded at greater convenience to the NYSE's users.

His point was that local companies and investors are best served by local exchanges. That shouldn't be any barrier to cross border trading, but it does mean that if you want to buy stock in General Motors, you would do better dealing through New York, not London or Frankfurt. The same is true in reverse. Nobody in their right mind would buy shares in British Telecom through New York or Siemens through London. The quest for a single European stock market may be an ill-founded one.

Currency instability

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, has set himself a new challenge. Having largely succeeded in a lifetime's ambition to make domestic monetary policy predictable and boring, thus depriving columnists like me of what used to be a staple diet of surprises and cock-ups, Mr King wants to do the same to the international monetary stage, which with its vast trade imbalances and sometimes violent currency corrections, he thinks of as far too excitable for its own good.

Speaking at Gordon Brown's mini-Davos in London yesterday, Mr King drew attention to the line in The Importance of Being Earnest in which Cecily is instructed by her tutor to read her political economy. "The chapter on the fall of the rupee you may omit", she says, "It is somewhat too sensational". The travails of the currency markets were also the title of a chapter in Bernstein and Woodward's classic account of Watergate when an official stumbles into the Oval Office to say: "Mr President Sir, we have a lira crisis on our hands". The President's ineloquent reply was "F*** the lira".

The present occupant, George W Bush, seems to adopt very much the same view about the dollar and America's burgeoning budget and current account deficits. He just doesn't seem to care that the euro has appreciated by some 50 per cent against the dollar over the last three years and the yen by 20 per cent, or if he does, he's certainly not showing it. If it helps American growth, he seems positively to welcome it.

Yet others are very concerned indeed. Junichi Ujiie, chairman of the Japanese investment bank Nomura, gave this chilling analysis to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week. If China allows the renminbi to float against the yen this year, and it appreciates by say 10 per cent, then reasonable Japanese economic growth of 2 per cent plus is assured. If on the other hand China does nothing, the present dollar peg remains, and the yen appreciates a further 20 per cent against the dollar, then there will be no growth at all in Japan and the economy might even plunge back into recession.

So will China move to a more flexible exchange rate system any time soon, possibly by pegging to a basket of different currencies rather than just the dollar? Yes we will eventually, said Li Ruogu, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China at the same meeting, but in our own time. China will not be told when to do it, there is no timetable and in any case the belief that Chinese intransigence is causing global trade imbalances is just plain wrong.

There is some merit in what he says. Only 10 per cent of Chinese trade is with the US, so getting rid of the peg and allowing the currency to appreciate might not have the severe effect on Chinese exports and growth everyone assumes. However, there are other distortions that are caused by the peg too. One is that it forces China to adopt the same monetary policy as the US, with very low interest rates and the economy awash with liquidity. The appropriateness of these policies for such a high growth economy are open to question. General price inflation seems to have been brought under control in China, but other symptoms of severe overheating abound. Property bubbles in Shanghai and many other cities in China make our own housing boom look like a vicar's tea party by comparison.

And what does Mr King suggest for making the international system more boring? For starters, he thinks it no longer appropriate to have the dollar as the world's only reserve currency, especially when it is so indebted. This in itself creates severe imbalances, with the Far East effectively lending America the money it needs to keep buying Asia's goods. Furthermore, G7 needs to be broadened to include non Japan Asia, in particular China and India. On both fronts there are signs that things are moving in the right direction. The G7 will eventually become the G12 - it almost was in London yesterday, with representatives from China, India, Brazil and South Africa as active as the main G7 participants - and some central banks are increasing the euro constituent of their reserves at the expense of the dollar.

But fortunately for us scribblers Mr King is still a long way from making the currency markets boring. We can expect a good few crises yet before the international system becomes as stable and predictable as domestic monetary policy.

jeremy.warner@independent.co.uk