All change for Asia's exchanges

A recent flurry of announcements has revealed the deep extent to which Asia's financial markets are being transformed. First, Chinese officials said they were looking at consolidating all the country's stock markets under one exchange. Yesterday, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing began trials of a new system, AMS3, that takes the broker out of stock trading. And, on the same day, the Singapore Exchange and the Australian Stock Exchange unveiled plans to form a link so that traders in Australia can directly buy and sell Singapore stocks and Singapore traders can directly buy and sell Australian stocks.