The shrinking stock market and remisiers

I REFER to the article DBS to merge retail equities trading into bank by year-end (BT, Feb 21). For those who are gloating over the plight of remisiers - from super earners in the heydays to retrenched professionals now - I suggest they think twice. The remisiers' plight is the result of the shrinking stock market and we stand to suffer more in the long term as our capital markets fizzle out.

The stock market is an asset pricing platform for budding companies to raise funds to further their development and for established companies with high potential to enjoy a capital advantage over competitors through a premium share price. Hence a healthy securities market helps to allocate risk capital to the deserving companies, a function which the banks cannot perform. This process can generate billions of dollars of value-add to the economy and thousands of jobs for our people. You can also forget about promoting entrepreneurship without a good platform for fund raising.

So the appropriate responses to the latest round of restructuring of the retail equities business at DBS should be: What will be the future of our stock and capital markets as a result of this? And before we can answer that we need to know - how did we come to the present state of affairs? Was there a plan to help the industry to adjust to a new business model before stockbroking commissions plunged precipitously after the commission liberalisation in October 2000?