Brexit or no, London has lost its lustre
Britain is rated by global money managers as their least favourite market in surveys by Bank of America
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 US 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 US rocketing, making the British capital, already a magnet for global money and gateway to the nascent euro area, an ideal alternative initial public offering (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 UK from the EU and the single market has chipped away at London’s global supremacy. As JPMorgan Chase’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 an...
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