London Has Lost Its Clout, Brexit Deal or No Brexit Deal
The City is still a vital financial center for Europe. But its ability to attract companies raising capital is diminished.
Shadow of its former self.
Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images
Back in the mid-2000s, when finance was booming and the City of London was at the peak of its powers, brokerage boss Michael Spencer joked that statues of two U.S. politicians — Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley — should be put up near the London Stock Exchange. Their tough regulation of Wall Street had sent the cost of being publicly listed in the U.S. rocketing, making the British capital, already a magnet for global money and gateway to the nascent euro area, an ideal alternative IPO destination.
Now one can imagine executives in Paris and Frankfurt mulling similar statues of Brexit architects Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, whose mission to remove the U.K. from the European Union and the single market has chipped away at London’s global supremacy. As JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s boss in France put it earlier this year, the likelihood of moving even one banking job to Paris was pretty much “nil” in June 2016. French officials estimate 4,000 Brexit-related jobs have since been announced.