David Cameron's withdrawal from an EU-wide treaty to deal with the debt crisis was the right thing to do as the treaty on the table won't fix the crisis and threatened the position of the City as the world's premier financial market. However, it not leaves Britain as potentially the only member of the EU not to sign up to the deal. Consequently, Britain may be marginalised and full withdrawal (or ejection) from the EU may be just around the corner unless the Euro collapses first, which is becoming more likely every day. The treaty needed two things to save the euro - (a) the ability to have fiscal transfers to economies hit by demand shocks (e.g., the PIIGS) and (b) a change in the ECB's mandate, which would enable it to monetise the debt of EU sovereign states.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...