Le Marché Gelé is Open
Le Council has enacted a petition. Le Marché Gelé is open, and a citizen may now offer anything they own to anyone who will take it.
When this petition was opened for appraisal, Le Council said it had no objection to the vision and no apparatus to govern it, and that enactment would require the formation of a new authority before the first offer was posted. Citizens were advised to begin forming opinions on what that authority should look like. Le Council has read them.
The Filing
Le Marché Gelé was submitted on the thirty-first of July by the citizen FatPenguin and carried at 23:54 UTC last night, twenty-six days later.
One hundred and eighty Seals were required—the second-highest threshold Le Council has ever set, behind only the petition on entrants. One hundred and eighty were affixed, by forty citizens.
Ⱡ100,000,000 were required. Ⱡ1,008,649,661 were contributed, which is slightly over ten times what was asked. It is the largest sum ever placed behind a filing—twice the previous record, and the first to pass a billion. Le Council has elected not to return the difference and declines to characterise the sum as an opinion.
The Authority
O.F.F.R.E.—the Office for the Fair Facilitation of Reciprocal Endowment—was seated this morning and administers Le Marché Gelé. Le Council does not administer it. Le Council wishes this understood before anything else.
O.F.F.R.E. does not set prices. O.F.F.R.E. holds both halves and records what two citizens agreed to.
What it holds, it holds in la Glacière. A half put up is frozen where it sits rather than moved, which has a consequence Le Council draws attention to: a share in la Glacière still collects its dividend and still carries its vote in the S.H.I.F.T. It has not left you. It has been spoken for.
Withdraw before anyone accepts and your half is returned entire. The filing fee is not returned. It is what a place on the book costs.
The First Ruling: A Counter May Be Made
The petition proposed a straight offer to everyone, taken or not taken. Le Council has kept that and added to it.
Anyone may take an offer at its ask. Anyone may also counter it with a different half, which goes into la Glacière on the same terms. Only the citizen who filed the offer may accept a counter, and when they do, every other counter is released and returned unasked.
Le Council makes no claim that this was requested. It observes that a marketplace in which the only two answers are yes and nothing is a marketplace in which most of what could be agreed is not.
The Second Ruling: The Levy Follows the Share
A share changing hands between two citizens never touches the pool, and therefore never pays the Open Ice Levy that rises as a register empties.
Le Council considered this for some time and rules that it will not stand. A share leg is charged at whichever is greater: the ordinary commission, or the team's current levy band. The brake on accumulation is not a thing two willing citizens may agree their way around.
The rate is quoted when an offer is filed and does not move afterwards. O.F.F.R.E. collects the commission it quoted at filing. It does not send a supplementary bill.
The Third Ruling: Only the Gap Is Counted
Every citizen carries a transfer window, the same allowance the Ceremonial Donation uses. Le Council has ruled that on Le Marché Gelé only the unmatched part of a trade spends it.
A deal whose two halves are marked at the same figure costs none of the window, however large it is. An honest trade has no ceiling, and a controlling stake may genuinely change hands. A lopsided one spends window equal to the difference, and spends it at exactly the rate a donation of that difference would.
Le Council's reasoning is that a trade is a gift plus consideration, and that only the gift-shaped part of it is any of Le Council's business.
It follows that a half must be worth something, and that the same asset may not appear on both sides of a deal. A gift is not an offer. Le Marché Gelé requires two halves.
The Fourth Ruling: The Marché Prints No Price
Le Council raised the question of the Marché's relationship to the Exchange when the petition was opened. It answers it now.
The Exchange is where a price is discovered against a curve, with S.L.U.S.H. always standing on the other side. The Marché is where two citizens agree one between themselves. Nothing settled at the Marché moves a team's reserve, and nothing settled there is published as the price of anything. The tape belongs to the Exchange. The Marché has a roll instead.
That roll is public, and it publishes both halves, what each was marked at, and the gap between them. This is Le Council's entire answer on the question of trade fairness. O.F.F.R.E. does not judge a price. It records one, where everyone can see it.
What It Costs
Ⱡ100 to file an offer, burned. Two per cent of what each side receives on settlement, which is the Exchange's own brokerage charged on both halves—so passing a position to a neighbour is never the cheaper route than passing it through the pool. More on a share leg where the levy is higher.
These figures are provisional. Le Council undertook to set the Marché's rates in the open and intends to put them to a Consultation once there is a week of trading to look at. Until then they are what Le Council guessed, and Le Council says so.
Finally
The citizen FatPenguin wrote that they were stacked with shavings and that Graine Wetsky was lowballing them.
Le Council has not addressed this complaint. Le Council has built a room in which it need not be addressed to Le Council.