German Giants Flee Wall Street

[The Northerner]

With expensive accounting rules, an increased threat of litigation and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for some firms, the once prestigious New York Stock Exchange and other American markets have become unattractive to Germany's biggest companies. Daimler and Deutsche Telekom have fled this year and the few remaining are likely to follow.

On June 18, the symbol of the German company Deutsche Telekom, DT, made its last run across the ticker at the New York Stock Exchange. Europe's largest telecom company left the world's biggest and most recognizable exchange after nearly 14 years of trading.

The company is currently in the process of delisting from all foreign exchanges and will soon only be traded on its home stock market in Frankfurt.

Deutsche Telekom is just the latest German blue chip to say goodbye to the American capital market. In an emblematic departure, Daimler, the first German firm to be listed in New York in 1993, officially quit trading on the NYSE on June 4, saying that it no longer needed a presence in New York to attract international investors. And Munich-based insurance and financial services giant Allianz abandoned the NYSE last fall.

The recent retreat of German firms from the American capital market has been nearly a decade in the making. Tighter regulations introduced by the United States government in the wake of the accounting scandals in the early 2000s brought extra oversight and added costs for foreign companies listed on the NYSE. Of the 11 firms on Germany's DAX index of blue chip companies that were at one time listed on the NYSE, only four still remain: Deutsche Bank, Fresenius, SAP and Siemens.

Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,706321,00.html

[Turbineguy]

1. There really isn't much point.

Wall Street firms can't make enough money (to satisfy themselves) doing what they are supposed to do, which is to connect investors with companies trying to raise money. The wall Street firms are interested in creating exotic leveraged schemes that divert money from the real economy and then place bets against client's success.