Sarko

I cannot say I am a Petit Nicholas fan, but Sarko appears to have referred to Dave Hug-a-hoodie as acting like an obstinate kid at the meeting the other day when 26 signed and Dave didn't so that some of us are thinking about changing nationality already. Who thinks what out there?

Was out walking locally and we ventured up an ally, and on the wall, in large letters, it said " Fuk Sarko". Isn’t English so universal?

Yeah. Anybody figured Hollande out? He strikes me as a slighty to the left John Major type. Went to same school as latter and lived many years not far from Huntingdon and so know the guy slightly, if you have insomnia have a talk with him and slide into a coma (honest!!). Suspect that a lot of that could come with H. Perhaps I should think about being CH after all.

Sarko or Dave... don't really like either of them. Don't follow what's going on in the UK or politics there so can't really comment on "Dave" and as for le petit Napoléon - he's still probably a safer pair of hands than Hollande... time will tell!

As for the latest EU veto etc. - been looking into becoming naturalisé before the UK leaves the EU for good!

Suzanne all the way with you and that was no rant. Regulation needs to be on the bleed of capital out of banking, since banking itself we need. The creation of non-existent assets needs to be stopped too or a repeat of the 1930s is a dead cert. Debate, thrive on it from dawn to dusk as long as it stays clean and to the point which what you are saying most surely is.

Christine, yes, yes and yes. Important. I even vote for our pre-ordained village council here and silly things like who will be the new Chancellor in Cambridge that do not have real influence in the world. The little bit of democracy we have left is our key to getting a hook on the things running away from the control of citizens back. So do it and never do not because of how silly an election may seem.

I support the Robin Hood Tax! I would say why, but don't want to rant (once I get started!!) Anyway, from now on I will be voting in every election I am eligible to. I think people tend to get complacent when things are going well Wouldn't it have been handy if the UK still had all that money it spent on the Iraq war? At least France still does - but the point is we knew about the bad practises of the governments and banks, but because we had everything we needed, we did nothing. I never wanted the conservatives in power because I always knew that David Cameron put corporations before the people. But I didn't vote!! (rant over...)

did that get a bit heavy for this time of morning - back to name calling of Sarko & Cameron...

Agree Brian, but regulation is difficult at such a complex level unless the regulators have employees as smart as the banks to know what they should be specifying needs regulating & to keep ahead of the changes proposed as new products are invented. Finding such employees would be impossible as they wouldn't work for the money offered by the governments/regulators since these top brains can earn so much more inventing these products for the banks which then means it has to be the banks doing the regulating of themselves.

Knowing what the regulator should specify needs regulating is one problem, then the banks capturing & reporting on this information to the regulator is another.

A further problem is that the regulator also needs people who can then a. understand b. interpret c. use the information being submitted to actually regulate or investigate breaches.

Significant investment would be needed by the banks to do this reporting and I would argue that it is the role of the banks who invent such products to make sure sufficient information is captured to monitor such trading effectively & the role of the directors to understand this information to ensure it is in the interests of their shareholders, customers & meets regulator guidance. The directors should be able to justify to the regulator why a product is within their wider guidance without having such strict controls that are either unmanageable or prohibit innovation.

The banks are currently investing heavily in meeting Basel III which should avoid them loaning money they don't have as their balance sheets should be more transparent than before, however the cost of this implementation is huge & will be felt by the customers with higher charges.

Only today a friend complained about the high cost of bank charges he had last month presumably because of hard times he has gone overdrawn, as a result he has spent money he didn't have & now has a higher debt. The money overdrawn would have been lent by the bank & whilst miniscule in comparison to the balance sheet of the bank would have to be reported (the capital used to fund his overdraft couldn't be used by the bank to invest elsewhere) so they make their loss of the opportunity to use that overdrawn amount back via his bank charges. Whilst the amount of the charges appears unfair - the bank not only has to communicate with the individual about them using money that isn't theirs but also they have to account for the cost of lending that money to the individual, something many people forget. If I lend you £50 of Bob's which I could have invested and got back £5 (dream world) then Bob won't be very happy with me so I have to charge you for lending that money. Generally people are very quick to slate the banks but at the end of the day they expect to be allowed to use the banks money without a cost to them. I'm not condoning the serious abuse with the mortgage scandal which has severely damaged financial services worldwide but I do think people need to have a greater understanding of the bigger picture rather than simply blaming it all on people who work for banks.

I agree so far, but the UK needs some kind of regulatory legislation to stop banking bleeding money out of any economy whether UK, EU or elsewhere and also by the sectors. Had the City, Frankfurt, Wall St, etc had regulation already then a large part of this mess could never have happened. Loaning non-existent money for trading, for instance, needs strict controls and there London and New York are where the buck should not stop but at least start. The FTT is not the cleverest idea unless proportionality is included, but the actual market behaviour makes even that idea so close to impossible to regulate that it is probably never going to work anyway. If they rethink and find something that will work along with the mostly really practicable principles in the new treaty then it will work and Europe as a continent will be competitive and thrive. Otherwise, despite the Chinese situation of the last few days, the malaise in other BRICs right now and the entire world anyway, Europe will pay heavily.

I support the decision not to agree to a Financial Transaction Tax because there are millions of transactions a day in financial services and every purchase or sale of stocks or bonds or whatever financial product by a bank would have incurred an additional tax. Since 75% of these transactions occur in the UK, it would have been British banks that paid most of these taxes. Replay that - it would have been British based bank's customers & pension fund holders who pay this tax at a time when we know banks all around Europe are struggling with their capital requirements why would we want to agree to make it even more difficult for them & Britain?

If we did agree to the FTT so we're not the odd one out then we could surely see all these financial services jobs from the City of London & all the supporting offices around the UK disappearing off to Asia or the US to avoid the tax, read more mass unemployment and a massive reduction in corporation tax into the UK coffers...how would sarkozy have felt if the proposal was a tax on every agricultural transaction? or Merkel on every engineering transaction? They too would have thrown their toys out of the pram I'm sure.

Eurocracy and the political end of the game are two different things Nick. I would agree, having worked for them on a few contracts directly or indirectly and consequently having paperwork to scare the faint of heart in order to be paid three months late and the like. Nonetheless, many of us have no real interest in Sterling any longer and my state pension will be so little that the odd couple of Euros won't excite me too much. There is far more than exchange rates in it anyway. A stable Europe is a peaceful Europe which is almost unknown in its history. I'd rather have that than a few extra Euros.

Well done Dave, why follow like sheep into the unknown when its ruled by the idiotic bureaucrats in Brussels ? My pound hasn't done this well against the euro for ages; changed over quite a bit of sterling yesterday on the back of Dave's action.

Hilary, like so many others before her, hooks on to Norway and Switzerland to prove a point about the EU and Euro. Norway popped in then popped out. It is a small nation with a lot of oil and gas reserves now. In the future that will run out and then? Switzerland, well roughly half of the country behaves as if it is in and flies the EU flag in their communes, over town halls even, they are in Shengen and have more or less a dual economy whereby when we go to visit family we do not absolutely need to get any Francs generally. Even a Migros supermarket will take the €. My Swiss wife, like me, is a social scientist so watches things in a particular way. We have seen their vast losses of money in international money deals, in fact they were scammed so badly two leading national banks went near the brink. Without a unified EU their lives get financially more difficult because with the end of the East bloc they have more European countries to deal with and exchange rates in a mesh rather than the present straight line. They are also small, in the middle of Europe with little of their own bar mountains and come the day will need to be part of a strong continental bloc. They know it and are simply holding it off. Are those good examples? So why on earth should Cameron try to stay in with so many euro-sceptics in his party who want out? His advisers tell him what is good for the UK. Will the EU and Euro survive? Well, the US$ did in the 1930s and recently with some re-alignment and re-evaluation and far worse inflation, debt and so on in both cases than the EU at present. Sarko was a bit rash but right, Cameron is sucking his thumb and cuddling up with teddy right now but if he is kicked out of the nursery then history will eventually turn against him and punish heavily. Time will tell and show, but economists who are not aligned with the Daily Telegraph, News International, the Daily Mail and worse (and believe me there is worse) are far more pragmatic and optimistic. We may get a two track Euro. At street level we will scarcely notice it, that is for higher finance. But ultimately Cameron has set and agenda for UK isolation and not all of us wish to pay the price he puts on us for that.

Why do so many people in England think we have never had a vote on the EU. We did. We voted to join "warts and all". I do not think it would have ever benefitted the UK to join the Euro. But that decision was Gordon Brown's - one of the cleverest Chancellors the UK ever had and one of the worst PMs. But he certainly was not working with Tory backing thats for sure!!

Not shaking hands w/ Sarko at the end of the "summit," probably helped both of them . In the face of a recession a little bit of inflation and quantitive easing (which caused no inflation in the U.S.) might not be a bad thing-help the debtors. Anyway the market has voted consistently on their failures to resolve, or even substantial impact, a serious crisis.

Lost all mine under a bloke called George W. whose compatriots had bought up a European fund that was originally a UK company in which my entire pension fund went. And then went. The brothers who obviously shoved the lot under their mattress closed their shop and put their hands up and said "we're broke", if Dave does not watch his step with the City he could be governing over such a big melt down as well.

Noyer is dead right, the Bank of England is busy printing funny money to quantitatively ease itself out of inflation. The ECB is refusing to do that. No quantitative easing means that there is also no room for new debts and a limit to inflation. Christian Noyer or Mervyn King right now, some choice of gurus. And there we have the obstinate kid at the helm...

Thanks David. After losing nearly a third of my pension in the last two years, You have done the right thing by people like me.Sarko maybe could see into the financial future and as the pound climbs against the Euro the French bank chief asks for the UK to be downgraded before France. If the French and Germans had their way then we would have had to pay an extra tax on our pension crossing from UK. Before Davids Veto the pound was trading at 1.16 Euros. At the time of writing this it is 1.19. I wonder if Sarko got his way whether he would have reimbursed the pensioners, living and paying taxes in his country, for our losses in International bank transfers

I'm no economist, but it seems to me before Dave rejects Merkozy he should have a look at the French Health System, the French Railways, French industry, Renault, Peugeot/Citroen, polite French kids who eat with their parents, etc...and take a two hour lunch break! Vivre Europe.

celeste, glad it came out that way and no sexist innuendos intended but Angela is a leotard and Davey and Nicky in leathers (or feathers perhaps) is highest camp in my books, yukkkkkk what a picture.

Right Bryan Noyer gets a few credits indeed.

Somebody just gave me the new definition of a worm as well: Clegg reappearing in the Commons yesterday!