Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Why are there so many stock exchanges in the world?
Nearly every country has its own exchange because so many countries have their own currency, and currency permeates every part of an exchange's business.   Generally, an exchange will support transaction and settlement only in local currency.  Securities (except those that explicitly enable FX trading) are denominated and will trade in a single currency-- you can only buy a share of IBM in U.S. dollars.  Securities trading always seeks to be a clean, frictionless, scalable process, and adding cross-currency translation to the mix would just complicate things.  So it's one exchange, one currency. In most countries, citizens and even businesses are largely restricted to having bank accounts in local currency.  There are various political reasons for this, but there it is:  it is difficult or impossible to open a domestic bank account in a foreign-denominated currency.  A public company headquartered in a given country will be required to publish financial statements in local currency, will be more likely to do business with the local citizenry and businesses in that currency, and so will likely look for investors from that same pool-- which generally means listing in local currency, which means on an exchange in that country. There are exceptions, of course.  Big multinationals do business all over the world, and many seek investors all over the world as well.  Mechanisms have been created to permit this (American Depositary Receipts or ADRs, for example).  But once again, cross-currency translation makes things more complicated, so ADRs and their like are only practical for very big international players. As to why there may be many exchanges in a single country, IMO Nick R has it right.  Read "Flash Boys"; many market makers profit from trading between exchanges, and so have an interest in there being many of them.  And in the U.S., regulators have expressed an interest in "innovation" in the exchange space, and so permit them.  There is also an argument to be made against having a single "Too Big To Fail" exchange just like the argument for banks, but I wouldn't call that a "reason" for the current state of affairs.