While it has often been said that trading is like dancing, exchanges have certainly been dancing with one another for some time, following the need to diversify and cope with the results of a challenging liberalisation process. The proposed merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse would...

The commodity market structure has changed at an incredible pace in the last 20 years and is now subject to intense scrutiny by academics and policy-makers. Taking a long-term view of price formation, empirical findings show that international trade and finance, mostly driven by emerging markets...

Over the last ten years the European unification project seemed to rely overwhelmingly on progress in economic terms. The most prominent achievements - the Single Market, the harmonisation of market regulation, the euro - were all driven by an economic rationale. However, attempts to rescue...

This report summarises the main results of a survey conducted by the European Capital Markets Institute (ECMI) during the period December 2009-July 2010. The survey aims to investigate the actual implementation of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), two years after it came...

Now that the worst of the financial storm is over, regulators are setting new strategies to deal with the systemic importance of the $427 trillion ($604 trillion) over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market. This paper explores the three major sources of disruptive effects in OTC derivatives...

What will happen if Italy is not able to implement structural reforms and if international institutions, such as the EFSF and the IMF, do not intervene with sufficient resources to prevent Europe's second-largest economy from defaulting on its debt? The potential costs of such a scenario are, as...