We have an Eton-educated prime minister, a fifth cousin of the Queen from a long-established family of bankers and stockbrokers; a chancellor who will inherit a baronetcy; a Charterhouse-educated culture and media secretary (tipped, until recently, as a successor to Cameron) whose father was an admiral and aide to the Duchess of Kent.
Such groups, which may include banks, insurance companies, stockbrokers and manufacturers, are common in emerging countries, where finance and industry are often dominated by a few powerful families and conglomerates.
Shareholders in Kwangju have attacked their stockbrokers and called for the market to be closed so that they would lose no more money.
Fund managers used to be paid far less than the stockbrokers that serve them, but the difference narrowed during the 1990s.
Stockbrokers say that their usual foreign clients pension and mutual funds, and specialist India funds—are bearish.
The poor people who write it, meanwhile, have little chance of making a fortune.It is this unpromising state of affairs that Tokyo's stockbrokers have turned into a sales pitch.
But in the past few months they have experienced its downside, as the market's first ever bubble has popped.The gloomy mood in stockbrokers' offices is in sharp contrast to how things were early last year, when they were crammed with excited small investors, eyes glued to the giant display screens as shares hit ever more extravagant highs.
Last June, it merged with the Egyptian Financial Group, an older rival, to form EFG- Hermes, Egypt's largest investment bank.Casablanca, which has only 13 stockbrokers to Cairo's 116, is a relative upstart in the financial markets.
That leaves them especially vulnerable to growing competition from retailers, manufacturers, consumer-loan companies, convenience stores, stockbrokers and foreign banks, who all want to get into retail banking.With mergers promising so little, it should perhaps come as no surprise that shareholders have become distinctly lukewarm to the banks of late (see chart).
America's online stockbrokers, becalmed by slow trading volumes, have been agitating the markets with merger talks among themselves.
He has questioned the general's wife and children, and ordered all of Chile's stockbrokers to produce whatever records they have going back to 1973 of transactions by the general, 38 members of his family and 29 related companies.
