When I started working in financial services in 2000, what shocked me was just how diverse the traders were. There were some people from rich families, some working class (I particularly remember one who had previously been running a market stall).
Turns out that capital markets have a great metric for ranking people without discrimination: how much profit they can make by managing their risk.
Ironically, the worst places I've seen for discrimination is in the public sector. They seem to see it as a virtue to promote people of their favoured race or sex/gender.
That's what happens. Almost all transactions are Straight Through Processed. It's only when things go wrong (or very exceptional cases) that a human gets involved.
The banks can't afford for humans to be involved in too many transactions.
Because with transactions things have to match and sometimes data errors happen.
Take something really simple like a bank cash transfer. Do you really think that no one ever accidentally puts in a typo in an account number or an amount?
If that happens then the transaction either fails or doesn't do as desired. Either way someone has to manually resolve it.
Take that and put it on steroids for securities transactions.
I once lived and worked in the US. To my surprise (as a Brit), each year we had a public holiday from work but where my kids still went to school and many other places were still open.
As is common with EU rules, this rule had serious side effects.
All that happened is that total pay stayed about the same, just that a greater fraction was salary.
Before, if times were tough, then the banks could significantly cut overall costs by cutting bonuses. With these rules their hands were tied - they still had to pay the higher salaries.
The European Commission has veto power over the European Parliament, so I'm afraid it can just force it through.
Doesn't normally come to that - there's enough corruption and alternative ways to pressurise the MEPs.
Northern Ireland is recognised as being part of the UK as per the Good Friday agreement.
There is no agreement at all that there would be no border between NI and the ROI.
Even when we were part of the EU, the UK (including NI) and the ROI were separate countries with separate laws, currencies, taxes and languages. There was a border when we were part of the EU and there's still a border now.
Came across a similar idea a few years ago: emotions are our perceptions of our bodies internal state.
Our subconscious responds to external events, releasing hormones and making other internal changes to our bodies. Whilst we can directly feel the impact of those changes (breathing rate, alertness, blood pressure, ...), like with our other senses, what we consciously pay attention to - what we "feel" - is the perception, which are our emotions.
Germany is in recession and so is the Netherlands. Yet the UK hasn't even had one quarter of negative GDP growth recently.
France is in political turmoil. Across the EU, far-right political parties are gaining real power. Yet in the UK the far-right (the BNP) has no power at all and no hope of gaining even a single MP.
UK politicians are being their usual level of useless, but they're squeeky clean compared to the Qatar corrupted bureaucrats infesting Brussels.
So yeah, I'd take Brexit Britain any day over the mess unfolding over the English Channel.
This applies to the real world as well.
I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias.
I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the accuracy of the other articles being reported.
Turns out that capital markets have a great metric for ranking people without discrimination: how much profit they can make by managing their risk.
Ironically, the worst places I've seen for discrimination is in the public sector. They seem to see it as a virtue to promote people of their favoured race or sex/gender.