The biggest problem today is that so much of the detail surrounding the new regulatory landscape in the UK is unclear, with many important matters still to be resolved. These in turn raise a number of potential pitfalls for the UK Government that need to be negotiated with considerable care as the new regulatory landscape is shaped.
In particular, we cannot afford to ignore the fact that policy making in the area of financial services regulation is now almost exclusively determined at European level and that Europe is in the midst of a period of unprecedented regulatory reform. The UK's bargaining power in the European legislative process has already been weakened by the perceived failure of Anglo-Saxon approaches to regulation.
It would be particularly unfortunate if it was further weakened by a self-induced period of introspection as lawmakers, regulators, financial institutions and lobbyists in the UK focus their energies on...