£57bn trade surplus from Britain plc’s booming City
BRITAIN’S world-leading finance industries bring in a £57 billion trade surplus and far outrank any other European nation, a report shows.
The study from TheCityUK lobby group reveals this is bigger than the combined surpluses of our closest rivals, the US and Switzerland.
It shows Britain has £6 trillion of banking assets – the highest figure in Europe – is the top foreign exchange centre on the planet, and has the biggest insurance industry.
The figures come amid growing evidence that Britain will not lose tens of thousands of banking jobs due to Brexit, despite what was claimed during the Project Fear campaign before the referendum.
Anjalika Bardalai, chief economist at TheCityUK, said: ‘The UK’s place in the global financial system is unparalleled.
‘London’s only real rival as a full-spectrum, truly global centre is New York.’
The study also shows that Britain’s investment companies are looking after a record £8.2 trillion of savers’ cash and that its internationally renowned bullion markets trade 19.5 million ounces of gold a day worth £18.1 billion. British law is the basis of contracts on every continent and the country’s legal professions are the second-largest with revenues of up to £476 billion.
A separate report by law firm Baker McKenzie found that the value of foreign firms floated on the London Stock Exchange surged to a five-year high of £6 billion in 2017. And analysis by the Financial Times newspaper shows that banks have drastically scaled back their threats to shift jobs out of London after Brexit.
Before the referendum campaign, City lobbyists claimed that 75,000 staff could be relocated or sacked if Leave won.
Individual banks also campaigned hard to stay in the European Union, with Jamie Dimon, boss of Wall Street titan J P Morgan
saying 4,000 of his 16,000 UK workers faced the sack.
But the latest estimates suggest that fewer than 4,600 jobs will move abroad across the whole industry.
It is a blow for London’s rivals such as Paris and Frankfurt, which have been desperately trying to steal lucrative business from the City. eurosceptic Tory MP John redwood said: ‘This is great news but not unexpected.
‘We were told we would lose thousands of jobs if we didn’t join the euro too, and the opposite happened. It’s just another example of the Project Fear campaign getting it wrong.’ earlier this year, Deutsche Bank executive sylvie Matherat said 4,000 of its 9,000 London workers might be shifted abroad.
But the new study suggests only 350 will go by april 2019. at J P Morgan, the true figure is expected to be around 700 rather than 4,000.
Goldman sachs, which has 6,000 people in the City, has never made a public announcement of numbers but estimates suggest it will shift 500 abroad.
The Financial Times – long bitterly opposed to Brexit because it could make life more difficult for big business to rake in profits – has become more moderate in the past few days.
earlier this week a columnist praised the ‘calm and friendly tone’ of talks and said the UK and eU ‘seem to share an aspiration to reestablish an amicable, working relationship’.
and yesterday, the newspaper warned that the far-right was gaining strength on the Continent due to increasing anger over immigration and Brussels rules.
‘Nativist ideas are continuing to infiltrate mainstream politics throughout europe,’ it said.
WHAT are they putting in the tea at the Financial Times this week? Is its Legion d’Honneur-holding editor on holiday? How else to explain the remorselessly Remainer paper’s abrupt change of editorial tack?
Both before and after the referendum, it obsessed about Brexit-fuelled economic Armageddon; predictions, incidentally, which are contradicted by figures showing the finance industry yields a £57billion trade surplus.
This week, the FT reported that dire warnings of an exodus of City bankers were hugely overblown. It also reports that European voters, furious at mass immigration, are refusing to give up further sovereignty to Brussels – a theme which will be familiar to readers of the Mail.
If the Pink ’ Un is now pink-faced with embarrassment over its Brexit hysteria, can we hope for a change among their fellow Jeremiahs at the Bremoaner BBC? WHATEVER the rights and wrongs of Rupert Murdoch’s bid to own the whole of Sky, the ineluctable fact is that with Walt Disney’s £ 39billion purchase of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment arm, Britain will lose a major technology company to the Americans. And because of the dilatory behaviour of UK regulators, the future of Sky News is now in doubt. Surely that cannot be a good thing?