Institutional Investors and the Language of Finance: The Global Metrics of Market Performance.

With the collapse of the TMT bubble and a number of high-profile scandals of corporate governance around the world, the language of finance is being re-written to include market inefficiency. Not surprisingly, there is an increasing premium on market information - national and international. As a consequence, the argument in favour of global standards has gained force, encouraged by new institutions such as the IASB. Co-existence of reporting standards seems a most unlikely prospect just as harmonisation may be less important than convergence to a set of standards deemed to be best practice in terms of global financial performance. With the increasing global significance of institutional investors and their portfolio managers, common standards set within well-defined parameters are clearly on the agenda; convergence is the name of the game rather than a tapestry of multi-coloured threads stitched together for the sake of expediency. In this paper, we develop these observations paying particular regard to the interests of institutional investors as well as the burgeoning market for global metrics not just national reporting standards