LIBOR refers to a package or rates of which the US Dollar 3 month Interbank offer rate is the most famous. If the Bank of England wanted to control this rate, they would have to come in with infinite liquidity to control the rate. The Fed effectively has infinite liquidity in USD so it can control the Fed Funds rate. Also, it is worth noting that the fed funds rate is an overnight rate, and 3m LIBOR is for three months, so the capital commitment to control it would be much larger.
black-scholes also assumes the ability to dynamically, instantaneously hedge with very low transaction costs I recall. The market-maker has to charge even more to recover costs in this case since they cannot dynamically hedge and bid-offer tight nor is the market deep.
Actually, when entities regulate their employees' trades in public and non-public equities, they typically also require pre-clearance for an member of one's household. At least that was the case for me. As a client paying sometimes in excess of $1,000 per hour, I think one has a right to expect this also.
I think the dealership model in general creates a bad experience for customers. I highly respect Apple for their single price policy. Rarely do any of their products go on sale. Outside of a few cashback, bundled item specials, or loopholes to avoid salestax, the price is the price. This saves me all the anxiety of needing to find a better deal online.
With cars, things are even worse. Having a multi-dealer and dealer inventory sales model necessarily creates a multi-price model. I think most consumers would be much happier knowing they got the best price possible without any extra work than dealing with all of the information asymmetry in buying a car.
Obviously speed and implementation details matter significantly. Your firm may have a better backend or superior code that allows the strategy to work better. Much of finance is working with attorneys to shift the system in one's favor. Gaining access to markets that previously did not allow foreign algorithmic trading, earning fee rebates on trades not available to others, etc matter increasing more in a business approaching saturation.
Excuse my pedanticism, but QCOM's market cap has more to do with their intellectual property connected to CDMA, 3G, and LTE standards than anything else.
Commercial real estate often operates with longterm leases and sometimes pre-defined renewal options. It is quite possible this restaurant signed a ten year lease in the shambles of the last tech bubble and now needs to renew the lease.
Perhaps they want to sell the x86 business and focus on the emerging ARM/alternative architecture business. I wonder what sort of non-compete the deal would include.
Being that IBM's POWER architecture is also a RISC architecture I would expect them to rally behind that, if anything. I've heard that POWER's performance had improved dramatically recently, so it would not surprise me if they were trying to push POWER.
