THE place with most at stake in the Brexit debate may be the City of London, Britain’s financial hub. Although the European Union’s single market in services is incomplete, it clearly works in wholesale financial services. Today London is more obviously the financial centre of both the EU and the euro zone than it was 20 years ago, inspiring much jealousy among potential rivals like Paris and Frankfurt. José Manuel Barroso, a former European Commission president, bluntly told a recent conference organised by UK in a Changing Europe, an academic network, that, post-Brexit, “London could no longer be the financial capital of Europe.”
