In Frankfurt on Monday night, Larry Fink, head of the world's biggest fund manager, made an eminently sensible plea for a properly-functioning capital market in Europe. It took less than 24 hours for the UK Prime Minister to deliver a blow to that dream.

Fink, like many others, was probably looking forward to the completion of the EU's Capital Markets Union project, launched by the European Commission in 2014. It is intended to reduce barriers to cross-border investing, wean Europe's companies off bank lending in favour of bond markets and tidy up the patchwork of corporate insolvency law across the continent.