The bankers would all move to Frankfurt. The hedge funds would all decamp to Zurich. The asset managers would be off to Paris and Dublin, and the lawyers, accountants and consultants would swiftly follow them.
For much of the last four years since the UK voted to leave the European Union, it has been assumed across most of the continent that one of the big prizes of Brexit would be repatriating the lucrative financial services industry out of the City of London to a series of European centres. Indeed, Paris was confidently expecting to boom on the back of all the business that would hop on the first Eurostar to make sure it stayed within the Single Market.
But hold on. Now that we are out, with only a relatively thin trade deal, and one that doesn’t even include financial services, it is not working out quite that way.
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