If you are a journalist, the French are great. They provide the juiciest copy, which can transform the driest topics into cannon fodder for xenophobes, and realists alike.
This time the task of ramping up Anglo/Gallic prejudices has fall to the Governor of the Bank of France Christian Noyer.  Talking to the ‘FT’, he suggested that the City of London should be stripped of its position as the financial hub of euro trading. So that’s bonds, derivatives, equities – in fact just about everything. If it’s finance and involves the euro, then London holds the position that should belong to Paris.
Mr Noyer said: “We’re not against some business being done in London, but the bulk of the business should be under our control. That’s the consequence of the choice by the UK to remain outside the euro area.”
The funny thing is, however, that Mr Noyer might be right – or at least partially right.
He is wrong about stripping London of its pre-eminent position. It is not up to governments to decide which centres should be hubs. You can’t wake up one morning, and say let’s rid London of its status as a financial capital.
But the markets can decide to do this. And there are signs that this is happening, and this is the price the UK pays for not being in the euro. It has nothing to do with the wishes of politicians, just the reality of markets.

But it doesn’t seem very likely that Paris will take over from London, however, not as long as France insists on anti-market friendly policies. A recent survey from the Conference Board in the US recently forecast that
France will be the worst performing economy in the world over the next ten years or so.  The report may or may not prove to be right, but even if there is only a miniscule of truth in the report, it is hard to see Paris taking over from London in anything. See: Is France really set to be the worst performing economy in the world over the next ten years? 
Moving away from France and the UK, there is the issue of tax avoidance. We hear about the evils of Amazon, Google, Starbucks and co avoiding tax, but the truth is that they are multinationals, and an advantage of being a multinational is that you can channel profits into countries where tax rates are lower. There is only one possible solution and that is to have some kind of minimum worldwide corporation tax rate (either that or have no corporation tax, at all).  Getting international agreement for such as idea is probably impossible, but a reasonable half-way measure might be an EU-wide corporation tax. Alas, the UK’s influence in the EU is such that it is unlikely to get such an idea through, even if it wanted to. This is another disadvantage of the UK’s EU cynicism.
On the other hand, a new series on ‘Sky News’ is set to expose the way the UK’s economy’s woes are focused on certain regions. As Ed Conway, the presenter of the TV series, said in the ‘Telegraph’: “It transpires that London and the South East of England never experienced a double-dip recession at all, they simply did not shrink through 2011 and 2012. The economic contraction that led to the national ‘double dip’ happened exclusively in the North, the Midlands, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.” See: Prosperity across the South is hiding a recession in much of Britain

 

Here is the irony. While some may lament the disadvantages of not being in the euro, the UK suffers from its own single currency.

 

Truth is that the success enjoyed by the City has pushed up the value of the pound so much that regions outside the South East struggle to compete.

So should London and the South East have their own currency, let’s call it the Boris? Maybe an independent Catalonia needs its own currency too.

You may think this is a daft idea. You may be right.

 

It is probably the case that if indebted European countries left the Eurozone, their economies would, after an initial shock, enjoy a strong economic recovery.

 

But if you accept that the idea of London having its own currency is daft, this would suggest you believe the euro must survive, at any cost.

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