It was very clever the way the USA and the UK did this hand in hand, step in step, so that it had almost no effect upon currency valuations. The EU of course sat back and sneered and now finds itself in a position where Germany basically told Italy it could not give state aid to it's banks, yet now finds itself in a bit of a quandary as to whether or not to bail out Deutsche Bank or to merge it with Commerzbank, ruining it's prudence reputation and showing Merkel up in the process. This is not a good situation for anyone, we have several thousand jobs at risk in their UK businesses, but shows how the EU rules are a disastrous one size fits all for totally differing economies.........