A call for Sir Nicholas Goodison to save the Stock Exchange for the nation

We need a fund for the preservation of financial monuments. Sir Nicholas Goodison — successively chairman of the Stock Exchange, the TSB and the National Art Collections Fund — would be just the man to head it. My fund would have saved Cazenove for the nation, and could now get a second chance with a monument familiar to Sir Nicholas: the Stock Exchange itself. As can happen with works of art, it has been given a stay of execution. The two foreign collectors who have cast covetous eyes on it — Euronext in Paris and Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt — are being held off by the Competition Commission. All that plumbing at the back of the Exchange, the pipes that carry the stocks and the money for clearing and settlement, would need to be sorted out, the Commission says, before either of them would be allowed to bid for it.