And it does rather show that all of the posing and blow-harding by President Nicholas Sarkozy and his allies in the European institutions about some great global agreement on banking regulation was nothing but euro-children playing at being banking big boys. They are not. Now Volcker is in charge, the Europeans will have to fall in with his plan. The new plan is built to reduce banking conflicts that the market has shown itself unable to regulate. There will be plenty of wonderfully-intrusive regulatory oversight. And the plan has Made In America stamped all over it. None of that 'international coordination' carry-on. Here is Charles Dumas (one of the wisest of City analysts) of Lombard Street Research writing earlier today: 'The lack of international coordination has been lamented in some quarters. But it was always a chimera. A strong lead from a man like Volcker is so obviously vastly superior to prolonged negotiations with a bunch of muddle-headed continental Europeans, who do not understand and dislike finance in the first place, that we should all emit a sigh of relief on that point.' 'The British will behave much more justifiably like "poodles" (a much maligned breed, by the way) on this issue than on others in recent years, and the rest can just follow along when they make up their minds to do so.' So, Sarkozy, Barroso, Van Rompuy: come along children. The grown-ups are back in charge of finance. The visit by the pontiff of course had to raise the question again about how much Pius XII did or didn't do to help the Jews during the war. I don't have the answer to that one. The Roman Jews form the oldest Jewish community in the world outside the Middle East. They were already established in Rome 200 years before St Peter arrived. Imagine: my neighbours' people were established in the city before any Roman had ever heard of a 'Catholic.' Or a Pope. I was still there during the last elections, when Gianni Alemanno of the National Alliance party (a party descended from Mussolini's fascist party) stood in the election for mayor. The Jewish businessmen of Rome, and as far as I could see a big part of Ghetto, backed him: any anti-semitism is long gone from the party, and the Jews reckoned that Alemanno's free market attitudes and pro-Israel stance made him the man to support. He won, and within just three or four days he made his first visit as mayor to Ghetto, where he was welcomed at the same Great Synagogue which welcomed the Pope yesterday. How things have changed around the Portico d'Ottavia.
22 January 2010 6:59 PM
Banking: the grown-ups are back in charge
18 January 2010 2:38 PM
2,200 years and a few things change
Sunday, 24 January 2010
President Obama might not know much about banking, but he knows a man who does: Paul Volcker, the hulking great 83-year old economist who was president of the Fed, American's central bank, during Ronald Reagan's presidency. The banking reform plan Obama announced yesterday -- or, 'Obama Hammers the Banks,' as the Financial Times had it - is Volcker's plan.
The Pope's visit yesterday to the Great Synagogue at Ghetto in Rome made me a little homesick. Not long ago I spent a year living at the edge of Ghetto, just two streets from that great pile of a synagogue.
All I know is that for a year I lived no more than a few hundred yards from the crumbling, ancient Portico d'
Ottavia, named by the Emperor Augustus in honour of his sister Octavia, the abandoned wife of Mark Antony. The portico was the place the Germans chose in 1943 to marshal the Jews for transportation. Passing it every day, and watching the elderly men and women of Ghetto come out in the evenings to sit in the cooler air and chat, made my Irish brain think more about the individual stories of war and less about the military and political history of 1939 to 1945. I would calculate the age of each of the elderly Jews I passed to try to think if they were old enough to have been living in Ghetto when the Germans occupied Rome: had they escaped, had they survived, or did they move here after the war?
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