Wednesday 22 February 2017

That Exodus from the City to Europe

As we tremble in our boots at the prospect of all those City firms upping and offing, the runners and riders for the Wannabe European 'Capital' City stakes are bimbling around somewhere near the starting line, bumping into each other, in the mud.  It looks like heavy going.

And here is what the tip-sheet says:
From Paris to Vilnius, Milan to Madrid and Frankfurt to Valletta, regulators, local authorities and sometimes national governments are clearing a path for the exodus many feel is coming ... or even Amsterdam ... Dublin is a serious contender ... Appealingly low-tax Luxembourg ... Milan is also making a pitch, particularly for technology and financial firms, with ambitious if probably unrealistic plans to turn the Expo 2015 space into a global tech hub.  Small, user-friendly Valletta, in Malta, fancies some insurance business, while Lithuania’s Vilnius and Riga in Latvia, want a share of fintech and support activities.  “We have the talent and we have the infrastructure,” said Latvia’s finance minister, Dana Reizniece-Ozola. “Everyone wants to put themselves on the map.”
Jolly good stuff, chaps.  Nice to see a united front.  And we all certainly fancy a bit of business.  By the way, I've been to Latvia, and Riga is very nice.  If you like little old Hanseatic League towns.  A bit like Lübeck.  Or King's Lynn.

Already on the map, really - for a nice bit of tourism.  Good luck with the global finance.

ND

PS, to be fair, that Grauniad article also gives a list of good reasons why it ain't gonna happen.  And they didn't even mention Civil Code and FTT.

PPS, the other day I watched Luxembourg's promotional video clip.  You know the way that in TV ads for BUPA private hospitals, the word CLEAN swims in and out of the picture, subliminal-message-wise?  Well for Luxembourg, the subliminal onscreen message-word was SAFE ...

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

The article quoted is from the Guardian, so what else would one expect?

Look forward to a re-hash cribbed from it by our National Broadcaster.
"The BBC has learned..."

CityUnslicker said...

So, perhaps for another post but my many meetings with the evil financiers in London reveal NOBODY is putting their house up for sale or sending little jonnie to a new school.

All companies are moving their HQ to Luxembourg if possible as they have promised 0% taxes, natch.

But they don't want to have meeting their so they are going to do fly in management meetings in another EU jurisdiction - Dublin - where a meeting and a drink is more congenial.

Air travel will increase, tax collection will fall, no jobs will be hurt in the process.

Then the EU will get uppity about being a tax haven and introduced FTT etc and the whole thing will collapse anyway.

All companies will also blame any bad nails or scratches or mass redundancies etc on Brexit for ever.

Anonymous said...

At what stage will the model of

Make it in Far East

Sell it in UK (or EU or US)

Tax it in Dublin/Luxembourg/Bahamas/Lesser Antilles at very low rates

become politically toxic?

'Never, because globalists own the media' is one possible answer I suppose.

Blue Eyes said...

There will be lots of very small offices of large firms dotted about. That will increase costs a bit and travel a bit. The work will be done in the best place - and let's make damned sure that is the UK. That means cutting the crap. Phil promised a more temperate version of Singapore. Let's get on with that instead of titting about and increasing income taxes/NI.

Also, we don't need bankers any more as we have a MANUFACTURING RESURGENCE! Who would have guessed that a fall in the £ would trigger an export boom and a rebalancing? Well, lots of people just none selected as Gods by the Economist/FT/Graun.

Britain is booming. Phil needs to put us on a long term footing asap and ditch this Brown/Osborne nonsense.

Anonymous said...

the evil financiers in London reveal NOBODY is putting their house up for sale or sending little jonnie to a new school.

Whilst there is some form of dumb logic in that, ultimately skills travel. Look at Trump. German/British.

Anonymous said...

Home Office contact of mine says that while 0,000's of euro-citizens are urgently applying for UK citizenship, numbers of Brits abroad applying for a continental passport are "in single figures" - which sounds like a slight exaggeration (downwards) but the point remains.

Anonymous said...

It's easy for any EEA citizen to become British if they have worked in the UK for 5 continuous years, or fulfilled the EEA treaty criteria for permanent residence in another way.

It's not so easy to become a citizen of any other EEA country. Some don't allow multiple citizenship. All require learning the language to a suitable proficiency.

Anyway how would the Home Office guy know. Other countries don't routinely tell the UK when a British person tries to become their citizen. Some might, in some circumstances (like wanting to verify a passport, or confirm lack of a criminal record).

dearieme said...

OK that was in 1970.

Anonymous said...

Slightly OT, ND, but what think you of Dominic Cummings? Mad, bad, brilliant? "A career psychopath"(D.Cameron)?

Just reading an essay of his on systems engineering/operational research as exemplified in postwar US missile production and the Apollo program. Never even knew there was a European space program back in the 60s, let alone that the UK was chucking cash at it as part of our Join The EEC strategy.

https://dominiccummings.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/201702-effective-action-2-systems-engineering-to-systems-politics.pdf

Some entertaining excerpts from his conclusions (on how se/or could be applied in government).

"Cameron and Osborne approached important policy on immigration/welfare in the opposite way by
1) promising to reduce immigration to less than 100,000 while simultaneously
2) having no legal tools to do this (and even worse promising to change this then failing in the EU renegotiation) and
3) having welfare policies that incentivised more immigration then
4) announcing a new living wage thus increasing incentives further for immigration.

They emphasised each element as part of short term political games and got themselves into a long-term inescapable mess."


And on Whitehall budgeting

"Budgets and spending reviews are the exact opposite of Mueller’s approach.
1) They are short-term with almost no long-term elements.
2) They do not balance off priorities in any serious way.
3) They involve totally fake numbers — every department lies to the Treasury and provides fake numbers. Treasury officials dig into these. There are rounds of these games. Officials never stop lying. To maintain the charade the Chancellor never says to the SoS ‘stop your officials lying to us’ — candour would break the system.
4) The Treasury does not have the expertise to evaluate most of what they are looking at. The idea it is a department staffed by brilliant whiz kids is a joke. I saw DfE officials with very modest abilities routinely cheat the Treasury."

Nick Drew said...

Interesting, anon @ 9:03, I shall take a look and post on it (because some ideas come immediately to mind)

Anonymous said...

Blue eyes is right, in LEAVING THE EMPIRE OF THE DAMNED - we have a Godsend opportunity to reset the economy and yes innovation is what we do, business can be a mainspring, despite the naysayers and AI technology.

JM Keynes once said:

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

I do honestly believe that, Mr. John Maynard Keynes he would be appalled at how his economic ideas have be so contorted and twisted by the masters of the universe and the economists aka the readers of the bones. Having said that, but then no one is sacred - not even Churchill has somehow been turned into a fan of the EU - or JC mimed by tony bliar.


As I say 'Blue Eyes' has it..............All it needs is, a government! yeah, a government with some bollocks, a clear vision which is not stuck up the mummified fundament of John Maynard Keynes! Plus, the requisite bottle to administer the proper retrenchment that is so quite evidently necessary. - but oh ferkin' eck - with Phil Hammond and mother sharisa................. ha, ha, ha, ha - they're a fucking joke and Britain even out of the Berlin trading bloc will probably drift but at least we'll be free - er.



OUT? hmm but please, don't hold your breath.





As to the City - paris? vilnius? It's either NYC or if, then, to Singapore and or, Bangkok to fuck their brains out for a semester or three and back to reality in Esher, Canary Wharf.

Blue Eyes said...

Ok this Anon is welcome anytime.

Anonymous said...

"I agree with Blue Eyes" - whod have thought it?

markc said...

I freely admit I knew / know little about Dominic Cummings. Name familiar but took a little prompting to place him as head of the Vote Leave campaign. After reading the paper linked to by Anonymous 0903hr it's clear my ignorance is unforgiveable. That's a hell of a good paper and in discussing the colossal failure of the European ELDO effort c. page 20/21 he shows that nothing, but nothing, has changed since (unless to get worse) in European projects.

Be interesting to find out how the experience of the LHC / CERN project plays against it; a project stuffed full of physicists and mathematicians and surely large numbers of the +3SD / +4SD types of people he credits with the US successes. It looks like a model of good practice from the outside. I wonder?

Anonymous said...

Cummings is one of those dangerous types who believes that some people are innately more intelligent than others (and that intelligence is to a certain degree heritable), which contradicts the "blank slate" theory beloved of our educationists. Hence his references to "+4 SD people".

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/12/michael-gove-special-adviser

"Michael Gove is under pressure to distance himself from his closest policy adviser after he wrote that most teachers were "mediocre" and claimed that a child's performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her education.

Shadow schools minister Kevin Brennan, responding to the revelations about Gove's special adviser Dominic Cummings, said his views "sent a chill down the spine" and called for an immediate statement by the secretary of state."


Blank slate theory is what makes the Guardian write "Why are the best State schools full of middle class children?".


Anonymous said...

PS - (anon 9.03 here) I picked up on the Cummings paper from Steve Hsu's blog - he's a US physics professor but with a broad range of interests - among other things he's heavily involved with the Beijing Genomics Institute which is throwing a lot of cash at working out the genetic basis of intelligence. So if you think there are a lot of bright Chinese students at Imperial and UCL as of now, watch this space.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/

He's also interesting on the pull of quantitative finance for his physics students, who can carry on in poorly paid but important research and hope one day to get tenure, or join a hedge fund and buy their condo in Aspen.