Hugo Dixon

The battle against Grexit – Greece’s exit from the euro – is far from won. Assume Athens is promised its next 44 billion euro tranche of bailout cash and some further debt relief when euro zone finance ministers reconvene on Nov. 26. Even then, the banks will still be hobbled, while another round of austerity is in the works and vested interests are rife.

It will be hard to restore confidence and, without that, there won’t be a return to growth. Meanwhile, without growth, Antonis Samaras’ fragile coalition government will fall. Alexis Tsipras’ radical left SYRIZA movement would then probably take over – plunging the country into a new hot phase of the crisis. What’s more, if investors and consumers fear such a scenario, they won’t start spending – making a continuation of the slump self-fulfilling.

Samaras, who became as prime minister in June, has been better than many feared. His strategy has been to do everything demanded of Greece by the “Troika” – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – with the aim of changing the perception that Athens cannot be trusted.

The prime minister had to make up a lot of lost ground: partly because of mistakes made by George Papandreou’s government; and partly because Samaras himself was unwilling to get behind the reform programme when he was in opposition and then brought Loukas Papademos’ technocratic administration to a premature end. The last year’s shenanigans – Papandreou’s aborted referendum followed by two destabilising elections – have savaged Greece’s credibility.

That said, Greece’s recent “good behaviour” looks like being rewarded by a cash injection and some debt relief. That will undoubtedly be good news – giving a new chance to the country, where I spent much of last week. But it probably won’t be big enough.

Is Francois Hollande more like Mariano Rajoy or Mario Monti? In other words, is the French socialist president condemned to be always behind the curve with reform like Spain’s conservative prime minister? Or can he get ahead of it like Italy’s technocratic premier?

I put this question to my fellow guests at a dinner in Paris last week. France is not in imminent risk of blowing up, as wrongly implied by the Economist magazine, which used a cover picture of a lighted fuse on baguettes tied together like sticks of dynamite. France is much richer than Spain and its people are more willing to pay their taxes than the Italians. French 10-year borrowing cost is only 2.1 percent, compared to Italy’s 4.9 percent and Spain’s 5.9 percent.

That said, the country has three deep-seated problems which could ultimately cause a mega-crisis: public spending at 56 percent of GDP is way too high; industrial competitiveness has steadily eroded; and the population is in a state of denial. The last cannot be said of either Italians or Spaniards.

Investors have been obsessed with the notion of “Grexit” – Greece’s exit from the euro. But “Brexit” – Britain’s exit from the European Union – is as likely if not more so. The country has never been at ease with its EU membership. It refused to join its predecessor, the European Economic Community, in 1957; it was then blocked twice from becoming a member by France’s Charles De Gaulle in 1960s; and shortly after it finally entered in 1973, it had a referendum on whether to stay.

The euro crisis has put further pressure on this difficult relationship. David Cameron’s Conservative Party, the governing coalition’s dominant group, delights in pointing out the flaws in the single currency. The party’s eurosceptics feel vindicated because they have long believed that monetary union was only possible with political union.

But “I told you so” is never a good way of endearing oneself to others. What’s more, the idea that greater integration in the euro zone has “remorseless logic” – as Britain’s finance minister, George Osborne, puts it – directly undercuts the country’s national interest. The more the 17 countries in the single currency club together, the more the UK will be left out on the fringe.

During the long upswing, second-tier and even third-tier banks felt they needed to offer every product in every part of the world. That led to inflated costs, unethical practices and now terrible returns. Last week’s bold move by UBS to hack back its fixed income division, with the loss of 10,000 jobs, exposes the myth of the so-called “full-service” firm.

The drive behind creating full-service firms was the idea that corporate and investor clients – say, Vodafone or BlackRock – wanted to get all their financial services from a single source. A further motivation was fear among commercial banks that they would be disintermediated by the capital markets. Corporate clients would finance themselves by issuing bonds to investors rather than borrowing from banks.

The full-service myth probably dates from at least the time of “Big Bang” in 1986, when London’s financial markets were deregulated. Over the past quarter of a century, the financial industry has been bulking up in investment banking either by acquiring rivals or by engaging in hiring sprees. UBS, for example, merged with Swiss Bank Corporation, which had already bought S.G. Warburg, and then acquired PaineWebber. It also made a disastrous push into fixed income trading, which cost its shareholders tens of billions of dollars.