 Welcome, everyone, and welcome, Nicola. Still on August 1, you can see that we've got a relatively big audience, which is indicative of us, because of closely people who have read Nicola's work over time. Nicola, it was born in Paris, and now lives in Washington. He's written, he's attached to Peterhead Institute, Peterson Institute. He also is one of the founding members of the Bruegel Institute of Brussels. He's written very extensively, particularly on areas around financial system, finance, financial reform. So thanks a lot for the first time. And it's a certain time I'm here at the Institute. I'm very honored, maybe, because the previous two were a fairly good discussion. And I'm looking forward to the discussion today. And that's actually the reason why I don't have a part-time presentation, because I keep my initial remarks pretty short, because I know that we can have a good conversation with the people in this room. So I guess the question is, what does Brexit mean, right? Like, in the seminar of the UK government today, I think they have a brainstorming, I read, which will be very interesting, I'm sure, for those who participate. So let me say a few things. I guess my main contention is that Brexit means hard Brexit, that I don't see a space for membership of the single market outside of the EU, for the United Kingdom, or England, or whatever, and it ends up being a lever. Why is that not only or even not primarily because of the often discussed issue of free movement of labor and migration? I think much more broadly, so single markets portray, at least in the UK press, as a sort of free trade agreement, but it's much more than a free trade agreement. It is a supranationalist thing. It always has been. It always will be. It has a supranational court. It has supranational enforcement. Actually, the more we go, the more supranational enforcement will have state financial services, which is the area in which most of my research is. And very few people in the UK actually has accepted supranational supervision of some financial institutions. It's a very limited set of market segments, specifying agencies and derivative trade repositories. By the way, I should probably disclose that I'm an independent board member of one of the derivatives trade repositories. The derivatives trade repositories are the arm of UCCC. But for those two market segments, SMA, the European Securities and Markets Authority, is the only supervisor in the European Union. And it supervises those two market segments also in the UK, in spite of being based in Paris. Why those two market segments? Because they weren't supervising for the crisis. So there was no established basis and no incumbent supervisors that would defend their turf, unlike for all the other supervised financial firms. But this is just to give an illustration of the fact that a single market, particularly but not only in regulated sectors like financial services, is much, much more than a free trade agreement and connected with this, a Brexit UK will not accept to be a member of the single market, even as leaving aside movement of people, they will not accept having to comply with rules that others have decided, which is what you have to do if you're in the EU. They will not accept the authority of the European Court of Justice. We saw that in the referendum campaign. They will not accept European supernational agencies based on the continent having binding enforcement powers on UK entities. So for example, you take the example I took, but this is my two examples. There are many bigger ones. Is the UK was interested in the market? That's not what we need as a provider of some financial firms into the UK. This is unacceptable for the UK, the British UK, especially if you assume, as I would, that going forward, there would be much more of that in the EU. What I'm mentioning for Esma was unthinkable the decade ago. It's like an existence notion of supernational supervision was dismissed by everybody as sort of a utopian fantasy. And I haven't even talked about banking union here. I'm talking about capital markets stuff. And we'll get much more of it. So for example, if you think of financial market infrastructure, also probably some fund regulation, maybe listing, authorizations, et cetera. So basically, to accept being in the single market without being in the EU, you have to be a country that accepts a lot of things, which typically are your country. I'm in Norway, became independent in 1905, as we were discussing at lunch, Iceland in 1944, Liechtenstein a bit before, but not much. And frankly, I mean, being French, I think of the similarity between England and France, which are deeply rooted in history. And the same way I couldn't imagine France accepting the discipline, I cannot imagine England. So basically, that's a very strong point because it organizes the discussion. If there is no space between being in the EU for the UK, between being in the EU and being outside of the single market, you have a pluralization of outcomes from the bulk of the current debate that still recognizes what I believe is a fantasy, which is there is something in between. So that's the main point I wanted to make as an introduction. Now, if you accept that pluralization, that means that you can sort of play with a more limited number of scenarios than, again, what you read in most of the debates these days. And I'm not saying there wouldn't be EVA for on a temporary basis. I'm just saying EVA or an EVA-like solution is not something that can be permanent. So in terms of the permanent scenario, well, you still have a scenario of reversal. I believe that would require a certain referendum. Certainly not on the cards now. Who knows what the political situation in the UK will be in one, two, three, four, five years. So I think that cannot be ruled out. And that's important because that means that a number of firms which are in the UK will not make irreversible business decisions to leave the UK or downgrade the position of the UK in their global strategies until the elimination of that reversal scenario. So basically, we have a holding pattern, not for holding communications, but for some, including some important economic agents because of the possibility of reversal. This applies probably to the large financial firms in the city. I think one reason why we have seen little decisions by large financial firms to re-adocate in the future or existing investments outside of London to the rest of the UK is deciding because they believe there is a distinct possibility of the exit decision being reversed. And in that case, it doesn't make sense to motocross in relocation or re-adocation. That's perverse, of course, because it means the downside of Brexit don't materialize, which means the UK can continue to have a political debate based on the fantasies that Brexit can be painless. But I think that's a reality. So life is perverse sometimes. And the other scenario is hard Brexit outside of the single market. Obviously that's very disruptive for the UK economy, particularly for the city of London. And if you do believe, like I do, that the state of London has been the main engine of UK growth and prosperity over the last two decades, that has profound implications for the UK. Of course, the city of London will remain the largest financial center in not only the U, but in its time zone, broader council. EMEA, if you will, Europe, Middle East and Africa for the foreseeable future because there's so much ahead of any possible competitors. So even if you think that the city declines in relative or even in absolute terms, and some new competitors takes up very dynamically, even in that assumption, it will take some time for the two lines to cross. So the city's dominance is not immediately challenged, but it challenges the city's dynamism and growth. And I think it would be severely challenged if the UK was to confirm a Brexit from the single market. Why is that? Obviously a number of activities are passport dependent, and they would have to migrate. But that's a relatively, it's an important, but relatively small share of total activity of the large financial firms that defines the city. Let's say for the sake of argument that it's somewhere between 15 and 25% quickly, which I think is not entirely absurd or of magnitude. But the point is, if you're the UK affiliate of the large global financial firms, let's say a US financial firm, it's a one-stop shop, right? You have Jake Morgan International, Sidney International, Goldman Sachs International, Morgan Stanley International, Bacro International, in the UK, they do all sorts of different activities in that legal entity. So they mutualize a lot of business lines, risks, exposures within that entity. And that's a network effect that has favor concentration of financial activity in the city, very powerfully over the last two, three decades. So my convention here is that if you take a significant chunk out of it, there's an incentive to take all of it out of London because of the same network effect, because of the same powerfully business incentive to locate a huge mix of activities in one single entity. I'm not saying in one single location, because it might be that these activities would be scattered in different places in the eurozone or EU, but in one single legal entity or business entity basically in one supervised entity. And if that's correct, even partly, that means that this network effect that has been so powerful, basically the best friend of the city of London over the past two, three decades would become the city's most impeccable enemy. And the reason for that is that I cannot imagine that there is no single place in the other 27 member states that may compete with London to attract these sort of activities in other terms. I'm not very bullish on Paris. I'm not usually bullish on Frankfurt, but I think if you take them all together, including of course Dublin, but also Luxembourg-Einstreet, I'm very important, Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Barcelona, you name it, you will, Edinburgh, it's not on the leaves of the UK, but let's talk about this separately maybe. There will be at least one and probably several that can eat the city's language in that sense and become the whole base for those pan-European entities that currently are located in the United Kingdom. So this argument about the network effect, I think, is what would make me lose more sleep if I was a bricklayer. And of course, with the city, come a number of professional services and a number of free politics. So I think the scenario of Brexit is a scenario of how Brexit, it's a very negative scenario for the UK. It will take time for those points, which I'm sure will be controversial here and not a matter of universal consensus. It will take time for those points to trickle down into a UK debate. And after all, if you believe that Article 50 may be triggered in April 2017, which we know now is a very earliest possible date under current circumstances, only one fifth of the time has lapsed since the referendum of the period between the referendum result and the triggering of Article 50, which is to say it's very, very early days in the UK debate. A lot of things are going to happen. A lot of things already have happened. I think none of us could exactly predict. But a lot of things, including strength things, will happen in the UK. The referendum result itself revealed undercurrents in the UK, public and voting opinion is that surprise, maybe not every one of us, but many of us, and it is true that there was a campaign of lies, but anybody who wanted to think through the consequences of Brexit had enough information available. And the fact that 50% of the voting public went for a lack of self-harm in my view, and in the view of many experts, as Michael Goff holds them, is something that I think we have to take very seriously in terms of what that means for the UK as a... For the UK political dynamics going forward in other terms, as Philip Stevens wrote, in the FTE, in the string of articles before the vote, the referendum was a test of whether the UK was still the pragmatic nation that we think, or that we used to think of it as being, and at this point, the result of the test is that it no longer is. So what does that mean for the rest of Europe? There are all sorts of ideas and proposals floating around. I think the basic fact is that so far we haven't seen political contagion. So at this point, we haven't seen, in any measurable way, the forces of your skepticism or anti-EU politics being strengthened by the UK referendum result. If anything, maybe the opposite, but the indicators are not very reliable, but that there is no evidence of political contagion, which is something that might not have been taken for granted, and so that's an important post-referendum observation that makes it even more likely that the exit negotiation will happen without treaty change, so it's a very likely position of the EU, even though there will always be this or that, national leaders saying otherwise, will be that treaty change may happen one day, but it's not before the UK exit is negotiated. And that's very important, because that rules out all sorts of fence solutions you can see now, because if you keep the current treaty, you really don't have that much marching of discretion in terms of the sort of middle-way scenarios between outside of the single market and inside the EU. So that means probably Article 50, even though that's not entirely certain, but I think it's very likely. And we know the features of Article 50, which is that once it's triggered, it's actually not good to be able to receive and are being so country-meaning, because Article 50 is basically engineered to make life very painful for the country that is. So that's gonna be interesting. I don't see an indication at this point that there will be any great leap forward of integration to the EU as a reaction to Brexit, nor do I see an indication that there will be any great leap backward of disintegration or unraveling the aware forces of both integration and disintegration quite powerful into a period before the UK vote. We will need one example of integration. Banking union is very transformational. We had the discussion this morning at the central bank, and I think banking union does make a difference even though it's obviously not complete. And on the forces of disintegration, obviously, they get today in the press, so I don't have to explain on this, but basically there is a rise of anti-system politics into the EU as in much of the rest of the world, and this anti-system politics often takes a form of anti-EU even so that's not universal. So that's obviously a matter of concern for the EU itself. And even so actually when you look at it, the loss of trust in national governments is at least as big as the loss of trust in EU institutions, but there is a general loss of trust in institutions and so the EU has to face this as a threat. So I think for the EU, we can discuss this or that policy and I have to discuss especially those that relate to the financial sector because that's my area of specific focus, but for the EU, at this point it's broad in business that we show no revolution in the EU from Brexit, while Brexit is a revolutionary event in the UK, so there's a little bit of an asymmetry in the sense and that would cover obviously the negotiation. Probably I should stop there and open it up.