UE

Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday that nobody in Vienna noticed the old order dying. Trams still ran, cafés still poured coffee, and the clerks went home at five. The rot, he said, doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as a series of small administrative facts. I thought of Zweig this morning, going through the last twenty-four hours in Poland and around it. Taken one by one, the items look like routine business. Put side by side, they say something less comfortable.

My grandfather kept his savings in a biscuit tin. Ask him why and he’d say, “Banks can collapse. The tin never does.” That tin comes to mind every time somebody mentions European capital markets, because Europe is, at heart, one enormous biscuit tin with ten trillion euros inside. On October 9, EU finance ministers agreed the backbone of their position on MISP, the Market Integration and Supervision Package. The idea: hand the European regulator ESMA some oversight of the biggest cross-border trading venues and market infrastructure, lower barriers for asset managers and smooth out certain cross-border transactions. A word of caution before anyone pops a cork. This is the Council’s negotiating stance only. Talks with the European Parliament still lie ahead, and it is a long road from here to law.