For years, the French have resented the success of the City of London. It has become the Rome of the globalised world, where the best financiers flock to do business, make money and pay tax. When Britain wisely stayed out of the eurozone, the City consolidated its lead as Europe’s only world-league financial centre. The best French financiers climbed aboard the Eurostar and headed north. Today, when you enter the quant trading division of firms like Barclays Capital, you hear the finest minds of the école Polytechnique speaking French to each other.
It is fashionable, nowadays, to declare this to have been a fraud, the City little more than a casino and the wealth it created illusory. But however much Nicolas Sarkozy might like this to be true, he knows it is false.
He may regard the City as a Petri dish of rentiers and their parasites.
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