Four years on, the version of Brexit for which the government opted has been harder than that in most City bosses’ nightmares. An industry that contributes 7% of Britain’s. Almost immediately, Amsterdam’s stock exchanges unseated London’s as the primary venues for European share trading. Over the course of January, London’s derivative-trading platforms lost three-quarters of their euro volumes to Amsterdam and New York.
Meanwhile, banks are mostly moving as few jobs as they can to satisfy regulators. That includes some senior staff, salespeople, traders, risk managers and compliance. But of the ten banks asked byabout their plans, none said they intended to shift people in numbers greater than the low hundreds. JP Morgan, whose parent company’s chief executive warned in 2016 that Brexit could cause the bank to cut 4,000 of its British jobs, will have moved fewer than 400 by the end of 2021.
London Stock Exchange still number one? Oops.