Europe and the UK still have to negotiate a financial agreement that will allow anything like the pre-Brexit status quo.
Photographer: Hollie Adams / Bloomberg
Photographer: Hollie Adams / Bloomberg
The European Union is unlikely to equate the UK with financial services, with the difference between the two “most likely scenarios” in the coming years, The adviser to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Jose Manuel Barroso, said.
“I personally believe that there will be no permanent equivalence decision on the part of the European Union with regard to financial services,” Barroso said at a Moody’s Investor Services webinar on Thursday. “It is more or less inevitable, irreversible, a tendency of progressive diversity,” he said.
The remarks of Barroso, who led the European Commission for a decade to 2014, highlight the difficult streak the EU has taken so far. Europe and the United Kingdom have yet to negotiate a financial agreement that allows for something like the status quo before Brexit. Talks that would end in March revolve around a way forward for cooperation and are primarily symbolic in importance, while decisions on equivalence are unlikely to come anytime soon.
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“It is clear” that the EU wants more business to move from London to the eurozone as a result of Brexit, Barroso added. The bloc wants the “disruption” of capital, people and ‘risk management from the UK to the eurozone and the European Union in general’, he said.