UPON joining a panel mulling new regulations for London’s financial industry in 2010, Martin Taylor was confronted with “an operatic chorus” of bankers threatening to move elsewhere if oversight became too strict. Moneymen from all sorts of firms told the former boss of Barclays, a big British bank, that they were on the verge of decamping to Switzerland, apparently a paradise of low taxes and sympathetic regulators, safely beyond the reach of the European Union’s banker-bashing. “The City”, for centuries a mainstay of the British economy, risked losing its status as the centre of global finance, and with it hundreds of thousands of jobs. It wasn’t until Mr Taylor learned that the financiers of Zurich and Geneva were simultaneously threatening to relocate to London that his concerns eased somewhat.
The grandees of the City are often accused of crying wolf, pretending that their industry is about to be devoured by taxes and regulation when in fact they are just trying to protect profits. In recent months, the same chorus that greeted Mr Taylor has joined a new crescendo, complaining of everything from a new tax surcharge on banks’ profits to London...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1KaiVS5
No comments:
Post a Comment