Sir,
Regarding ‘Skills shortage worsens EU unemployment‘:
As a recent graduate from the London School of Economics and holder of a European Parliament scholarship from 2007-09, I have now been making hopeless overtures to the job market for longer than I care to count.
During my four years of graduate studies, I have consistently taken up internships in [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘Parliament gears up for fight on financial regulation‘:
I’m writing to state the case against any US bill that includes a financial transaction tax. Two bills in particular have proposed this tax as a way to pay for job recovery programmes: ‘Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009′ and [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘EU plans to review mortgage access rules‘:
A 40% cap on loan-to-value (LTV) to obtain a mortgage, as mentioned in the article, would be a vast overreaction when one thinks of the millions of successful borrowers and mortgage products as compared with the far smaller number of bad debts and repossessions.
As the Royal Institution of [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘Lawmaker: ‘Financial regulation must be tailored’‘:
There is so much speculation on how best to proceed in regulating the financial sector it is hard to know where to begin. However, it appears to me that the main criterion is not one of regulation but one of consumer confidence.
To this end, what the powers that [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘Hedge funds seek allies in new EU Parliament‘:
The EU president (created by the Lisbon Treaty) should be given a veto over decisions reached by qualified majority voting (QMV) in the Council.
The way in which QMV functions presently is deeply undemocratic. States with nothing but an academic interest in an issue can pass legislation which [...]

Sir,
The big banks, which caused the current recession, refuse to take responsibility to date. By calculating excessively high interest rates, the economic recovery is being blocked.
EuropeanCompanyMarket has found that the negative sentiment is fortunately decreasing. The number of visitors on the website www.E-cm.eu is increasing. People from all over Europe are interested in starting companies [...]

Sir,
Your LinksDossier on the PSD (’Payment Services Directive: The end of cash era‘) states:
“The Payment Services Directive does not cover Internet payments. Online purchases are regulated by the eMoney Directive adopted in 2000. The Commission is currently waiting for the PSD to enter into force before coming out with new proposals to amend the eMoney [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘EU expert group calls for tightened financial supervision‘:
A new report from Corporate Europe Observatory, entitled ‘Would you bank on them?’, tried to highlight the problems of privileged access and policy capture by vested interests that can result in flawed policies and regulations.
In the report, we examined whether the group’s members represent a range of [...]

Sir,
Regarding the article ‘EU agrees joint line on global financial reform‘, published on Friday 7 November 2008, concerning the G20 summit in Washington on 15 November:
It is better, of course, to go to such a summit after having hammered out a common position. But will it be possible to deliver the expected swift decisions without [...]

Sir,
EU regulators continue to call for a third pan-European card payment system. All well and good. However, their commitment to stoking payment network competition and how they’ve pursued it leave much to be desired. Their actions suggest they simply want another regulated card-payment network public utility, one they can call European.
Regulators worry the European card-payment [...]