| There's been much chatter about the lack of a government agenda or ideas for growth in Bloomberg coverage over the last few days. The government certainly has to show how Brexit can be made to work better as every day brings new eminent voices raising their worries. Today Huw Pill (the very same) added his voice to Bank of England opinion that Brexit made UK's financial woes worse (it caused job shortages, strengthened price pressure and drove up inflation — the hit to GDP, the Bank thinks, will be 3% within 15 years). Perhaps in an attempt to get a grip on this, overnight saw No. 10 briefing that a long-awaited "Big Bang" in banking could arrive imminently. Alex Wickham reports here that the government will do this by relaxing the ring-fencing of banks brought in in the wake of the financial crash in 2008, separating retail from investment banking. "Banks had asked the Treasury to scale back the ring-fencing of retail and investment banking," writes Alex. "Small lenders had said they would like to cut the amount of loss-absorbing capital they are required to hold." "Ring-fencing doesn't work," Tim Adams, CEO of Institute of International Finance, said on Bloomberg TV this morning. "It makes a more brittle system, it precludes institutions' capacity to move capital around to their best uses."  Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe Bloomberg Opinion's Adrian Wooldridge weighs in on why the search for growth, by a governing party of 12 years' standing, matters. His piece this morning, as so often, is a reminder of the long view. Wooldridge has read, with a fine tooth comb, two recently-released blockbuster politico-books documenting first the downfall of Boris Johnson and then the downfall, just five weeks later, of Liz Truss. Two very different characters with a similar flaw, he suggests: An inability to sweat public service delivery. "They didn't focus enough on delivering policy and improving the lives of the people who sent them to Downing Street." He goes on to say the new PM "has a good track record of crafting and delivering policies." Even so, he concludes, "it is probably too late for the Conservative party." This paragraph sums it all up: "The two books are full of insider gossip, like Victorian three-bird roasts [lucky them] involving various fowl stuffed into each other for Christmas feasting. Both volumes also, if unintentionally, demonstrate that the British political system needs serious fixing if the country is to have any chance of addressing its poor productivity, decaying infrastructure, collapsing health-service and struggling education system."  Many of these stately homes are empty and collecting dust. Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg Bloomberg's Jack Sidders and Sam Dodge map out the London properties owned by sanctioned Russian oligarchs. | 
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