At a time when the market expects nothing but delays from regulators, Europe's key watchdog the European Securities and Markets Authority did something unprecedented yesterday: it fast-tracked its hotly-awaited advice on foreign supervisory regimes.

Esma has been engaged in the painstaking process of assessing how regulatory regimes in foreign countries match up to its own. In short, it wants to be sure that a foreign supervisory regime is sufficiently robust before it permits EU institutions to do business there.