For generations government regulations and business traditions confined financial activities within national borders. Leaders and borrowers maintained relationships with domestic bankers, who offered little in the way of innovation or advantage. But the abolition of fixed exchange rates, along with hyper-inflation in the 1970s spelled the beginning of the end for this system. By the 1980s the financial game in the UK, Japan and USA was being played ith some important new rules, and by many new players. The old world of relationship banking had given way to financial transactions based upon price and product innovation. Macroeconomic forces and the policies of central bankers have profoundly altered international trade, exchange rates, and the flow of capital around the world. David Meerschwam explains these economic forces, describes the dramatic effects of de-regulation in the major centres of finance, and shows how financial services firms have had to alter their strategies and develop new skills in order to compete

This paper suggests that the interactions of security trades and quote revisions be modeled as a vector autoregressive system. Within this framework, a trade's information effect may be meaningfully measured as the ultimate price impact of the trade innovation. Estimates for a sample of NYSE issues suggest: a trade's full price impact arrives only with a protracted lag; the impact is a positive and concave function of the trade size; large trades cause the spread to widen; trades occurring in the face of wide spreads have larger price impacts; and, information asymmetries are more significant for smaller firms

This paper suggests that the interactions of security trades and quote revisions be modeled as a vector autoregressive system. Within this framework, a trade's information effect may be meaningfully measured as the ultimate price impact of the trade innovation. Estimates for a sample of NYSE issues suggest a trade's full price impact arrives only with a protracted lag; the impact is a positive and concave function of the trade size; large trades cause the spread to widen; trades occurring in the face of wide spreads have larger price impacts; and information asymmetries are more significant for smaller firms

This paper suggests that the interactions of security trades and quote revisions be modeled as a vector autoregressive system. Within this framework, a trade's information effect may be meaningfully measured as the ultimate price impact of the trade innovation. Estimates for a sample of NYSE issues suggest: a trade's full price impact arrives only with a protracted lag; the impact is a positive and concave function of the trade size; large trades cause the spread to widen; trades occurring in the face of wide spreads have larger price impacts; and, information asymmetries are more significant for smaller firms