Brexit

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There is a consensus that the EU’s integrated financial market is one of its great success stories. It makes it easier and cheaper for French farmers, German manufacturers and Italian fashion designers to secure funding. It helps EU citizens get better returns for their savings. And it also creates jobs, not least in the UK, where financial services as a whole employs more than a million people, two-thirds of them outside London. But it is now at risk. It is underpinned legally by the “passporting” system enshrined in EU legislation, which allows banks based in the UK to sell services to customers in Europe, and banks based in Europe to sell services to customers in the UK, and access the global financial centre that is London. It also allows banks based in one EU country to set up branches in any other EU country without going through local regulators.

Banking is probably more affected by Brexit than any other sector of the economy, both in the degree of impact and the scale of the implications. It is the UK’s biggest export industry by far and is more internationally mobile than most. But it also gets its rules and legal rights to serve its customers cross-border from the EU. Banker colleagues in other EU countries all agree that disrupting the free trade in financial services would be self-inflicted damage. The top regulators in the UK and EU also agree that we must retain the integrated financial market. If we left it all to the regulators, we would have a relatively quick and rational economic solution. But politics trumps economics and it will be the politicians who decide.

Brexit politicians are putting us on a fast track to financial jeopardy | Anthony Browne | Opinion | The Guardian

The case for European integration rests on the recognition of one’s own country’s growing irrelevance. But this simple insight remains a national taboo in Britain. A few important exceptions such as David Miliband aside, it seemed nearly impossible for most English politicians or pundits to say: look, seen from China or Brazil the difference between our country and Belgium is a rounding error; 0.87 per cent of world population versus 0.15 per cent.

Britain: narcissist nation | Prospect Magazine