Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, has dashed hopes of an EU-UK super-equivalence deal on financial services, post-Brexit. He recently said the UK cannot expect preferential access to EU financial services markets and will have to rely on patchy equivalence frameworks used by third countries such as the US. Mr Barnier added that the EU’s main financial centre cannot exist outside the EU for financial stability reasons.
These are early days in the negotiations, so positions could change. However, what Mr Barnier is proposing is basically a ‘hard Brexit’ for the City of London, implying that any free-trade deal would likely favour physical goods over services.
