Cutting out the middleman

THE broking houses that control today's stock exchanges must feel rather as Europe's clergymen did during the Reformation. Or so reckons Fields Wicker-Miurin, a consultant at A.T.Kearney and former finance and strategy director of the London Stock Exchange. All through the Middle Ages, she says, the church successfully kept religious texts and discourse in Latin. Then along came translations of the Bible into the vernacular. Suddenly, all believers could talk directly to God, and to each other. For the clergy, life was never the same.