Brexit ‘won’t harm UK banks’
BRITAIN’S banking industry will emerge largely unscathed from Brexit and retain its position as one of the world’s top two financial centres for the foreseeable future, Barclays’ chairperson John McFarlane told Reuters.
Home to the world’s highest number of banks and largest commercial insurance market, the City of London and its sister district in east London’s Canary Wharf are scrambling to prepare for Britain’s departure from the EU, the biggest challenge the UK financial sector has faced since the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009.
McFarlane shrugged off fears expressed by some bankers and politicians that a blueprint for Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU, proposed by Prime Minister Theresa May, would cripple job creation and trigger London’s rapid decline as a global financial services centre.
“I don’t think in the long run that there will be terminal damage (to London),” McFarlane said in an interview in his capacity as chairperson of lobby group The CityUK.
Brexit will cost Britain up to 12 000 financial services jobs in the short term, the City of London financial district’s leader, Catherine McGuinness, said on Tuesday.
But McFarlane said London would remain Europe’s primary hub for financial services because the city has the continent’s deepest markets and broadest pool of talent, scotching doomsayers who claim the sector could end up the biggest loser from the end of unfettered access to EU markets.
Supporters of Brexit admit there may be some short-term pain for Britain’s $2.9 trillion (R38 trillion) economy, but that it will prosper in the long term once cut free from the EU, which they cast as a failing German-dominated experiment in European integration.
A sharp spike in Italy’s cost of borrowing in late May also handed EU stakeholders a sobering reminder that the EU needs London’s markets as much as London needs the EU, McFarlane said. – Reuters