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A top policymaker at the US SEC on Thursday night sought to defuse an outcry in the UK over comments in which he was reported as having described the London Stock Exchange’s junior Aim market as “a casino”. Roel Campos, one of five commissioners at the US market regulator, sparked a furious response from the LSE after a Dow Jones newswire report in which he said that 30 per cent of companies listing on Aim were “gone in a year”. “That feels like a casino to me, and I believe that investors will treat it as such,” he was reported as saying. The LSE hit back angrily, declaring Mr Campos’s reported failure rate an exaggeration by a factor of about 10 and hinted that jealousy over Aim’s success in attracting US listings lay behind his comments. “Since the beginning of last year, the number of US companies on Aim has  almost doubled to 60,” the LSE spokesman said. “It is therefore surprising that Mr Campos should make comments that are so  entirely wrong. They do a disservice to the quality small companies choosing to  join Aim, the institutions choosing to invest in those companies and the high  regulatory standards that the LSE promotes.”  But Mr Campos said his remarks were “taken out of context”. Asked by the FT if he felt that Aim was a casino, he said: “Absolutely not, I don’t believe it’s a casino and that was not the intention….What I was referring to was a generalised situation in which if [regulatory] standards are ignored and you have a spiral downward you could get into a situation where an exchange could be nothing more than a casino.” The speed of the LSE’s reaction — and damage-limitation efforts by Mr Campos — underscored the intense rivalry between London and New York for stock market listings.