Passport-Waving Socialist Challenges London’s Power in Europe

[Joanne98]

Source: Bloomberg

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) -- European Socialist Party President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen waved his red passport at hundreds of hedge-fund and private-equity managers in London’s 600-year-old Guildhall to assert his challenge to the city’s financial power.

London, the meeting place in Europe for bankers and traders from New York to Mumbai, faces an unprecedented challenge to its right to set the rules of financial engagement. Rasmussen, 66, is pushing European Union legislation of all hedge funds and private-equity funds that want to invest in the 27-member region, which makes up the world’s largest economy.

“Having a passport as a financial player to the whole of the European Union’s financial market, that is so valuable,” Rasmussen told a packed audience at the Sept. 11 meeting. “If you come from the United States and want to have this passport, this common-entry passport to the EU’s financial market, you’re not going to have it free.”

Europe is forging new laws and institutions for markets after the region’s largest pension funds lost 18 percent, or $560 billion, of value last year, according to consultant Watson Wyatt Ltd. As many as three new European financial regulatory agencies with the power to overrule national authorities may be announced today, pressuring London’s bankers.

“Punishing or somehow reining in the financial services industry is not the answer,” Ian Luder, the 681st lord mayor of the City of London, said at the annual Mansion House banquet last night, according to a copy of the speech. London’s financial center is a “major national and international asset,” he said.


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