Morgan Stanley to Shift About $120B of Assets to Germany

https://www.euractiv.com/section/enlargement/news/uk-no-long...

Edit: There was quite ridiculous scare mongering in the UK media at the time about Bulgaria and Romania. No doubt part of the general trend that eventually led to Brexit.

Edit: without forgetting the underlying economic motives of all parties, in which moral arguments do play a part due to their ability to influence actions.

On paper, monetary union has prevented the economic integration from happening. The diverse economies of the EU are diverging; the north is reliant on export markets outside the EU, while the south is destined for decades of internal devaluation, even in a best-case scenario. Does this help social integration, or does it foster mass resentment rooted fundamentally in cultural differences being amplified?

I am not sure whether you are claiming that this exists, but having visited and lived in multiple places in the EU (including outside of the UK), I never felt that people had a sense of an EU-wide brotherhood. People are generally quite worried about that sort of thing for obvious reasons, and culture varies sufficiently over the EU to make such a thing difficult. When discussing the influence of people's morals over their arguments over national interests, you also have to consider the context of people's morals: which agents impose them (either explicitly or implicitly) and the motives behind their imposition. I don't mean to use the word "agent" in a necessarily negative tone. An agent could just be your mum. However, when you look at more powerful agents than your mum, such as the education system, Instafacetwit, newspapers and the law, people's morals start to gain a greener hue (in dollars).

Also I fully agree that a subset of players in the environment might all come out in the money.

Finance is just one criteria.

Most city rankings place Paris pretty close to London.

And don't forget that a good chunk of London's financial prowess is for it serving as turntable between the US and the EU.

Here’s what I see as the basic problem. Most countries are ethnostates, including most European countries. The UK is still 80% ethnic British, Germany is still 80% ethnic German, Sweden is 80% ethnic Swedes, etc. Regardless of political differences, they have a strong common bond. Americans don’t realize just how strong this bond is. I’m a Bangladeshi immigrant raised in America. I have almost nothing in common with most Bangladeshis. But my ancestors are buried there and that means a lot.

In the US, there is no common ethnic ties. (No ancestry makes up more than 15%.) As my wife says, America is a “credo nation.” In a way that’s a strength, allowing the country to readily absorb immigrants. On the other hand, that’s basically a political ideology disguised as a national culture. What do Americans that don’t share politics, and don’t have the close ties that come from living in the same geographic area, have in common? Culturally there are large divergences. The United States is the most religious developed country in the world, comparable to Poland or Iran in terms of people who pray daily. But large pockets are as secular as Paris. In fact possibly more so. In France, for example, the cultural Catholicism of French secular society mediates between Paris and the daily churchgoers in the rural areas (https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...).

What would happen if people in France got to control abortion or religious laws in Poland? That’s maybe even understating the distinction. France, perhaps as a result of cultural Catholicism, has abortion laws that would be unconstitutional in every US state (generally illegal after 12 weeks). 24 weeks is common in the US, and states like Massachusetts want to make it legal based on a doctor’s judgment up until birth. (However justified, it’s undeniable that law is based on sweeping moral premises regarding when personal autonomy or the judgment of a single expert can override the state’s authority to protect life). What would happen if a court in Brussels had banned schools in Poland or Italy or Spain (or heck, Germany or the Netherlands or the UK) from offering even religious education even on an opt-out basis? Or struck down nearly every country’s abortion laws? Would anyone still want further EU integration?

The US has long papered over these differences with an exaggerated patriotism. Commonality through the belief in the goodness of America, it’s constitution, and its history. That hasn’t broken down completely but it’s breaking down.

America has been more divided before. But the nature of the country was very different back then. In a country where the federal government is tiny and focuses mainly on defense and regulating interstate trade, these differences just don’t mean as much. But that totally changed in the 20th century. FDR killed federalism and fundamentally changed the nature of the country. Meanwhile, the Warren Court inserted the federal government into myriad social issues. Suddenly, the federal government had to power to decide that you couldn’t have prayer in schools and you couldn’t shut down strip clubs. World War II, the post-war economic boom, and the external threat of the Soviet Union provided a common identity and shared purpose for a long time. After the fall of communism, that evaporated.

What’s left country of 330 million people, faced with the same economic challenge all developed countries are facing, but also deep cultural fissures. The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett was a stark example of this. She’s insanely popular among Republicans, with 95% of people approving of her. Democrats, meanwhile, didn’t just attack her judicial philosophy. (A sitting Senator called it just “another way of saying racism, sexism, and homophobia.”) They said she was a character from a dystopian science fiction novel. Whatever your politics you have to appreciate the significance of that. On one hand you have people who see her as a model of an exemplary life—and the values that produce such a person. And on the other hand you have people who see her as an attack on modernity itself.

Now, you obviously have liberals and conservatives in every country, and political and social disagreements. I suspect, though, that the difference between Massachusetts and Louisiana is bigger than between Bavaria and Berlin. Regardless, Germans are still Germans. Americans don’t understand how powerful that bond is, because they don’t have it and don’t realize that maybe they need something else to fill the void.

I'm more confident that any 'damage' done to London will be a consequence of remote working practices from COVID, and not current politics between Europe and the UK.

Nonetheless, I can recall 3 news articles saying the bank would close shop in London and the last one specifically called out my department to be closed. None of it was true, in fact we were still hiring. Lesson learned that newspapers would say anything for eyeballs.

If people made the arguement that London is good at finance because londoners (and it is londoners, not brits overall) want it more, I'd agree. When people say it's the language or the timezone I'm very unconvinced. Otherwise, why hasn't Ireland eaten our lunch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

No, just because "you were born a free human" (whatever you mean by this) you wouldn't be able to easily move to the UK if it was not for the freedom of movement.

The only reason you were able to _easily_ immigrate to the UK is because of freedom of movement and UK being part of the single market.

Speak with anyone trying to stay in the UK (being from outside the EU). I'll tell you a secret, it's very hard, and it costs money. It costs employers, who'll need to go through headache of sponsoring your visa, and it'll cost you, who'll need to pay to the Home Office if you want to stay.

I have numerous friends and people I studied and worked with over the last 12 years in the UK that couldn't stay. They were from Russia, Australia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, etc. Every time I discussed with them their visa situation and attempts to stay in the country, I thanked god that where I emigrated from, we've joined the European Union and I don't have to deal with these issues. It's a nightmare.

You, as a EU national, can look for a job and work here without a permit, you can reside here without a permit, you can stay here after studies or employment, and from legal point of view, you enjoy equal, non-discriminatory treatment with same rights and access to employment, working conditions, social & health security and tax advantages as UK citizens.

No, you cannot have the same and "move to any other country in the world which isn't part of the EU as well, so clearly my freedom has nothing to do with the current 4 "freedoms"."

That doesn’t solve illegal immigration, it just promotes illegal documentation forgery and illegal under-the-table employment on top of illegal immigration.

OTOH, illegal immigration is easy to solve, you first align the numerical limits of your immigration system with demand by retaining only in-total and not per-country caps, and then, if you want a more complete solution, you make those caps soft caps instead of hard caps by allowing supernumerary immigrants that would be qualified but for numerical limits to temporarily reside while waiting in line for a regular slot (or just bypass the line entirely) by paying an annual (or, for the bypass mechanism, larger one-time) impact fee to address expected social costs.

Now, the problem is that many people who say they want to “solve” illegal immigration don’t want to solve illegal immigration, they want to limit total immigration and, particularly, limit immigration of certain nationalities for which there is high immigration demand, and are using “illegality” as a cover.