Scary tale of New York

It’s Christmas, almost, so time for the stock market grinch to make an appearance.

The Financial Times reports this week that things are getting worse for the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and its effort to hold on to—not even increase—the number of listed corporates in the UK.

The FT says the LSE is set for the fewest listings in 15 years. Companies are either decamping from the LSE to the US, or bypassing the LSE entirely for their first listing.

Charles Hunt, head of research at stockbroker Peel Hunt, roars in the FT: “We cannot be taken seriously as global leader in finance if we do not have a thriving equity capital market.”

Worse, he declares the UK “does not have any god-given right to be a leading listing venue”.

As everyone knows, the US is awash with liquidity at the moment, which is like a siren song to boards.

So, no present under the Christmas tree for LSE leaders this year. Santa’s taken his gifts to NYSE.

It was the great stock market seer Shane MacGowan who wrote of New York: “They’ve got cars big as bars, they’ve got rivers of gold.” Just wondering what’s in London’s waterways at the moment.

A resounding blow

Should Britain’s whistleblowers be paid to turn in their employers? Some think the UK should emulate US measures, which have seen whistleblowers handed huge pots of cash for shining a light on wrongdoing.

In a piece for the Oxford Business Law blog, a trio of legal eagles from Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto argue that payments would be useful for British whistleblowers.

In fact, their entire article is devoted to debunking the opposing arguments.

Top of the list of those claims is: “There is no empirical evidence of rewards leading to an increase in the quantity or quality of disclosures.”

You can almost hear Stephen Kohn, Melissa Revuelta and Geoff Schweller make their wry smiles. Why? They close on the following nugget of information.

Fourteen years after US legislation introducing whistleblower payments, “over 85,000 whistleblowers have filed claims, and hundreds have collected over $2bn in compensation”. That’s quite the empirical evidence.

Lords—but not cricket

The Football Governance Bill continues to cause a bit of argy bargy in the House of Lords, where it has been hotly debated.

This time, their lords and ladyships had a spat over measures in the bill that require clubs to report on the action they take to improve “diversity and inclusion”.

Former Marxist Revolutionary goal hanger Baroness Claire Fox took a punt at this one, insisting this kind of reporting was a “bureaucratic process” and “I would even say a bit of a virtue-signalling racket.” She asked for the diversity reports to be drop-kicked out of the bill.

However, there were safe hands on the government’s goal line. Baroness Fiona Twycross, leading the bill through the Lords for Number Ten, threw herself in front of the ball: “Under the corporate governance code, clubs will simply be required to explain how they are applying the code and what action they are taking on equality, diversity and inclusion. That is not onerous, but is a very helpful transparency measure.

“This transparency will only be a good thing, and I am afraid that if noble Lords disagree with that, we are simply of very different mind on this issue.”

The crowd goes wild, no need for VAR, the diversity reports are saved! Twycross keeps a clean sheet.