City Restructuring for Big Bang

Abstract

When Sir Nicholas Goodison and Mr Parkinson shook hands on their pact for the dropping of the OFT case against the Stock Exchange in return for concessions, it was the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end, of the City revolution. Vast changes lay ahead and many of them were not yet widely predicted in the City. For the Exchange, the priority obligation under the deal was to open up entry through admitting lay members to its ruling council and to create an appeals body to see that would-be newcomer members were not unreasonably barred. Yet more important, the council had to decide how to dismantle fixed commissions, within the promised three-and-a-half year time limit, and whether to do this by stages or in one go. And beyond this were ranged the further key questions whether single capacity should be preserved and what trading system should replace it if it was not.

Big Bang, hypothesis in cosmology, a view that the present apparent expansion of the universe started … with the violent explosion of an originally highly compressed and intensely hot homogeneous material … In some theoretical models of the future, the expansion will continue into an infinite dispersal. In other models, it will be slowed and eventually reversed by gravity and the universe will then collapse catastrophically upon itself … This cycle of explosion and collapse may repeat itself, perhaps endlessly.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia.