From a corner conference room overlooking the Thames, Michael Sherwood, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has the guts to voice publicly what many in London’s centuries-old financial district are increasingly worried about behind closed doors: that threats to Britain’s membership in the European Union are threats to British business.
Over the past 15 years, Goldman, like many of the other 250 foreign-owned banks in the City, has consolidated its European operations in London to take advantage of the EU’s $16.6 trillion–a-year single market, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its May issue. Wide-open access to that market is now in doubt because of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s promise to hold a referendum on EU membership by the end of 2017.
Opinion: Keep Calm and Save the EU
If Britain votes to quit the EU, Sherwood says, parts of London’s banking business would inevitably drift to Frankfurt and Paris.
“We want the U.K. to stay in Europe,” the 48-year-old banker says. “The U.K. leaving the EU would lead to some sort of fragmentation of our business. The City would definitely be impacted.”
Sherwood is not alone in opposing a Brexit, as a British departure from the EU is known. A 2013 survey by TheCityUK, a bank lobby group, found that 84 percent of finance industry leaders want the U.K. to remain a member of the EU.
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This is a lengthy article manly about manoeuvring to maximise headroom for pigs feeding at the trough, with no regard for the constitutional or general health and well-being of the British people. There is very little meaningful discussion about the burden of undemocratic EU legislation imposed and enforced on British people, and independent businesses many of whom do not trade with the EU. They also don't give any worthwhile information about the real costs to the tax paying public both direct and indirect. They do make a comment about the financial industry being the biggest in the UK and yet it only accounts for 12% of tax receipts. There is also no discussion about the fact that the British public have bailed out the fraudulent crooks in the world of finance, and effectively continue to underwrite their future failing yet to hit home, through the bail in policies. They neglect to discuss the real implications of the ECB which is a scandalous and flawed concept in and of itself. No mention of the impact vast sums of fiat bailout money have had on the UK economy, through a slight of hand inflationary process which has devalued the pound in real national and global economic terms. This scourge of the modern world should have been left to wallow in the financial cesspit they irresponsibly created. If an exit from the EU would reduce the number of these parasitic organisations on our shores the sooner we leave the better off we will be.