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Luckily they couldn't do that -- not without quitting the EU, which would result in an entirely different clusterfuck. (And I need to blog about the second-orde
by cstross 14y ago
Luckily they couldn't do that -- not without quitting the EU, which would result in an entirely different clusterfuck. (And I need to blog about the second-order consequences of that at some other time. For starters: the way the City of London would respond (mostly by pulling the eject handle and relocating to Frankfurt and Paris), the way the US multinationals who use the UK as an Anglophone business centre in the EU would respond (ditto), and how the Commonwealth would respond ("we only loved you because you were a cheap way to get our exports into the EU. Bye!") ...
- arethuza 14y agoUnfortunately, the UK (or a post-independence Former United Kingdom) leaving the EU seems to be a clusterfuck that seems to be gaining a surprising amount of momentum.
- iuguy 14y agoThe City of London cannot pull the eject handle and relocate. The City of London is a separate legal entity[1] with it's own laws and rules, and it's those rules that meant that the trading that took down Lehman Brothers was conducted in the City of London, because it couldn't have really legally taken place elsewhere. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
- cstross 14y agoYou're missing the point: the institutions that are headquartered there conduct a huge volume of Euro-denominated derivatives trading, which becomes impossible if the City loses its license to do so, and it's hard to see them retaining it if the UK leaves the EU. So those banks would have to relocate their investment arms to somewhere in the EU. That's got to be worth several points off the UK's GDP. Instant recession -- and it's not recoverable.