London remains the world’s top finance centre ahead of New York City and Hong Kong, defying ‘Project Fear’ predictions that financiers would lose confidence in Britain after Brexit.
London was placed first, followed by New York City, Hong Kong, and then Singapore in the Z/Yen global financial centres index (GFCI) on Monday, reports Reuters.
The index ranks 92 global financial centres on factors such as access to high-quality staff and infrastructure. New York City was 24 points behind London, representing the biggest gap between the two centres since the survey began in 2007.
At the end of 2016, a study likewise showed that almost three-quarters of British bankers believe London will still be the financial centre of Europe in five years’ time.
Defying predictions from EU loyalists and Remain campaigners, in September Breitbart London reported that Britain’s manufacturers and retailers were enjoying a surge in exports and sales.
“Britain’s manufacturers are enjoying buoyant conditions on the back of export markets going from strength to strength,” announced the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF), following a “major survey” of some 416 manufacturing firms.
“Manufacturers appear to have taken the recent political upheaval in their stride,” noted EEF chief economist Lee Hopley, with the cheaper pound boosting British firms’ competitiveness abroad — as experts predicted.
Likewise, the British automotive industry has seen a boost with Aston Martin announcing a £500 million anglo-Japanese deal on August 31st and Nissan announcing one week later it would be investing £36 million in car production at its Sunderland plant.
Online retail giant Amazon will also be establishing a major technology hub in Cambridge, with Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s chief executive of worldwide consumer retail, telling the Financial Times: “The UK has been an incredibly important business for us… We [are] concentrating scientific development work in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh, because they attract great people.”
He added that the UK was “a great place to recruit machine learning expertise”, and said that “for us, it’s a place we will continue to invest in heavily for all of those reasons”.
Wilke’s words were at odds with much of former Prime Minister and Remain Campaigner David Cameron’s administration’s rhetoric during the EU referendum, which suggested investment would dry up if Britain voted to leave the bloc. The reports produced by the Treasury, led by former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, have since been dismissed as “very flawed and very partisan” by academics.
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