scrumpyjack wrote:Sadly I think it will turn out to be a lot easier for the EU countries to build up viable financial services than it will be for the UK to build up the sort of successful manufacturing business that Germany has. The City has a very inflated view of its own brilliance.
I am not so sure that it will be all that easy for say even Frankfurt to become a serious threat to London at least for the next few years. The continentals are pretty bound by rule books all the time but London is much more pragmatic in my (limited) experience. Certainly that is very evident in insurance which is a very large invisible export not just to the EU of course, but around the world. They are very used to the need for licences and so on. Would you believe that Lloyds insurance market has to be licensed individually in every US State so they are well used to that sort of thing. I imagine the big international financial service firms are as well.
Maybe one of the advantages of fairly incompetent regulators!
Dod