[URBAN NOTE] "What Brexit Means for the City of London"

[rfmcdonald]

The Wall Street Journal's Simon Clark and Anuj Gangahar report on the potential for catastrophe in the post-Brexit London financial industry.

London risks losing thousands of finance jobs to other European cities following the U.K.’s historic vote to leave the European Union.

Keeping those jobs here depends on the U.K.’s ability to strike a political deal that allows it—now as an outsider—to access the trading bloc’s single market, according to a senior official at the City of London Corp.

The City of London Corp. has governed the square mile around the Bank of England and St. Paul’s Cathedral for centuries. Its leaders campaigned to remain in the EU in the run-up to Thursday’s referendum. Their stance was backed by many executives at the big global banks and other financial companies. Together they wanted to retain access to the EU’s single market of more than 500 million citizens.

Hundreds of thousands of people work in the City of London district, and thousands more work in finance jobs elsewhere in the U.K. capital.

“The City will remain a major international financial center whatever, but clearly the nature and its size will depend on what we can negotiate,” Mark Boleat, the City of London’s policy chairman, said in an interview on Friday morning after the result of the referendum became clear. “There was never going to be a mass exit of banks in terms of numbers. The question for us is whether they are here with 15,000 staff or 5,000.”