by Liam Halligan
Telegraph.co.uk
was in Milan last week, giving a talk on Brexit, when news broke that Italy’s biggest bank had lost its chief executive.
UniCredit is close to crisis, its share price having plunged 40pc during 2016. The entire Italian banking sector is looking extremely fragile, in fact, with bank share prices down, on average, by a third since the start of the year. You don’t think that matters to the UK? Well, think again.
We’ve heard a lot of blood-curdling statements about “the dangers of Brexit” over recent weeks from the Treasury and the Bank of England, vital institutions which, regrettably, now seem to be entirely politicized. But we hear much less from officialdom about the considerable dangers of staying in the European Union.