As Italy’s oldest bank is poised to merge with its second largest, Bob Lyddon considers the failure of Eurozone governance and its potential consequences – from which the UK is not immune
The UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement (2019) with its Northern Ireland Protocol remains one problematic matter of unfinished Brexit business. Less widely known is the matter […]
This article as it appeared on CommentCentral on 4 August 2021
A certain David Pitt, fresh from his triumphs as Chief
Operating Officer of Test and Trace, has been appointed as Chief Executive
Officer of Pay.UK, the company responsible for the UK’s main payment systems.
This is not a joke, although the timing is unfortunate, coinciding
with the unfolding pingdemic […]
It looks likely that Unicredit will be entering into a shotgun wedding with Mone dei Paschi di Siena (MPS). Unicredit will be compelled by the Italian political and monetary authorities to act as a White Knight.
MPS just failed its European Banking Authority Stress Tests but then it has been flat broke for years.
For a putative […]
Title page of PSR’s latest emission on the scope and tendering process for NPA
What started out as a Temple of Solomon to revolutionise the UK’s payment systems will now be reduced to a more manageable bungalow-sized development. Multiple layers collapse down to one.
The
UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), who started this show rolling in 2015 by
creating […]
Two of the key patagraphs in the Withdrawal Treaty itself
What are HM Treasury and the EU playing at? Their dispute rumbles on over whether the Brexit divorce bill is the EU’s estimate of £41bn or HM Treasury’s (or rather the Office for Budget Responsibility’s) of £35-39bn.
The discussion feels phoney. The quoted amounts cannot include all […]
This is the actual agreement…
Below is the text of an article we had published on CapX last week about the bunfight between HM Treasury and Brussels on the supposed size of the Brexit divorce bill: in short, neither of them can know for sure what it is because of the loopholes in the agreement on […]
The discussions and calls following the launch of my Bruges Group paper “The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme” surfaced two areas for further examination.
One was the “pot calling the kettle black” issue: why is the UK structurally and materially in a superior position (even if we have the wrong direction-of-travel and share some of the […]
I have been in a lot of calls since the launch of my Bruges Group paper “The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme”.
Two issues keep coming up and so I have decided to write two notes on them.
This first one comes down to the pot not calling the kettle black. Or, put more elegantly, […]
Walk-through of newly-issued Bruges Group paper on the ECB PEPP programme – the epitome of the failure of the euro.
PLEASE CLICK THIS LINK TO PLAY…
We have had a new paper published through The Bruges Group.
It is about the ECB’s new QE programme, called the PEPP or Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme.The sub-title of the paper encapsulates it very nicely: “the undermining of the Eurozone as a free financial market, the epitome of the failure of the Euro project, […]