When an administrative process to regulate or monitor affairs, requires the participation of a number of institutions that depend on each other to ensure that affairs move forward, there is a need for strict coordination between them, if efficient implementation is to be ensured.
Clearly, each and every institution needs to be itself efficient. If any one is not, the process will stall and indeed could be stopped completely. It's like links tied into a chain. The material used could be of the toughest steel but the chain will only be as strong as its weakest link.
This conclusion holds right now for the institutional players in the financial services sector. Improvements there cannot follow simply from the introduction of the necessary new procedures. Alongside them, efforts need to be deployed so that all institutions involved are operating from the inside and on the outside, forcefully and effectively.
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Brexit... again...
How empty and superfluous sound the position statements and speculations regarding the situation in the UK about Brexit, especially when they are made by... let's call them third parties... who in the present state of affairs, have no voice in the negotiating chapter, or what's left of it.
The UK is undergoing its greatest political crisis of the last ninety years or so. The normal ways by which the country operates its parliamentary democracy are jammed. The options for the future remain clouded in fog. There is no majority in favour of any one option. And unfortunately, the chances are that this political turbulence will grow.
For somebody like me who still has a very soft spot for the UK, the ongoing confusion is nothing less than a tragedy. It hardly matters who is responsible for it. "Official" comments made at the margin of the central negotiations simply serve to amplify the noise generated around Brexit, nothing more.
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Hella Haase
Though it's been quite a while since I got to know about Hella S Haase, a leading Dutch novelist, only recently did I get down to reading anything of hers - in this case, a historical novel about Rome's last pagan poet, Claudius Claudianus, from the fifth century AD. In translation it was titled "The taste of bitter almonds".
During the last ten years, since the murder of the politician who had been his patron, Claudianus has been in hiding. He is now charged in court before a judge who like him had in his youth, come to Rome from Alexandria. The two have followed contrasting careers, for the judge got integrated in the dominant Christian structures that ruled in Rome, which was sacked only a year previously by the Vandals. The poet earns a living by teaching literature and is now under suspicion of working to promote banned pagan practices. We witness the confrontation beteen the two men.
Haase's writing is effective because it uses words sparingly. Perhaps indeed, her style is too economical. To understand well the development of the plot when a quarter through the novel, I needed to carry out some separate "research" about the life of Claudianus. Perhaps it would have been better to have first sampled instead one of Haase's "Indonesian" novels. Till the next time...