The economic inefficiencies of market liberalization The case of financial information in the London Stock Exchange

This article returns to the long-running public service versus free market debate in media and communications but from a rather unconventional perspective. Critics of the steady, globally driven marketization of national public media and information services tend to object on social and political grounds. Market advocates, in contrast, make their case on economic grounds. Greater competition in markets, including media markets, brings economic efficiencies which, in turn, are a 'public good'. This economic assertion is rarely scrutinized within media studies. The study presented here, which looks at financial media and communications in the London Stock Exchange (LSE), does just this. In recent decades the LSE has been opened up to accommodate the needs of international financial institutions and international capital flows. This has had a detrimental impact on its media and information systems. Such liberalization, it is argued, has made the LSE less economically efficient, not more, and with quite negative economic (as well as social) consequences.