Risk and Reward - Why the UK is always swimming against the EU tide

Benjamin Wrench is a barrister who has specialised in financial services regulation since 1997. You may know him as the author of "Risk and Reward - Why the EU Separates Risk from Reward and What this Means for The City".

If you don't have the time to read the whole publication, you can find a neat summary of the key points in this CityAM post.
Wrench explores the philosophical disconnect between what Jean-Claude Junker calls the "Anglo Saxon World" and continental Europe.

I asked myself why the UK is always swimming against the EU tide, and discovered that at root it is about the different approaches each has to organising society and how those different philosophies deal with two things in particular: risk and reward. But in a wider context it is also about choice – our ability as individuals, and society, to choose how each of us wishes to balance financial risk and reward.

You can also find a transcript of Professor Booth's speech at the launch event here: "Brussels or London – which is the lesser of two evils?"...

The essential problem is that we have come to believe that uniformity of regulation is essential for free trade. It is not. It would be much better if we had international trading arrangements – including within the EU, but on a wider basis too – whereby we decided to unify or make our regulations consistent by consensual agreement and rather than using a centralised process to create enforced uniformity. Of course, it would be better still if the UK returned to a situation whereby contract law and institutions that evolve within the market itself where the only regulators.