If the City can’t replace 75,000 jobs, it has bigger problems than Brexit

The wine bars will be spookily empty. The lap-dancing clubs will be abandoned, and Savills will have to start working out how to sell mansions within an hour’s commute of Frankfurt and Paris instead of London. Just about every day brings another dire prediction about the impact of leaving the EU on the City’s mighty financial services industry. Only this week the Bank of England, which has turned itself into a semi-official  chorus of doom on the issue, joined the fun, with reports that it was predicting 75,000 job losses.

No one denies that would be serious. The City is one of the most dynamic parts of the British economy, creating wealth that ripples out through London and the rest of the South-East, and contributing billions in tax revenues every year. And yet one point is too easily overlooked. In the context of of the finance industry, 75,000 jobs are not that many.