London’s killer app

In the comments at Blood & Treasure, Dsquared explains why banks threatening to leave London don’t have to be taken too seriously:

In actual fact, the thing that keeps everyone bolted down to the UK with little hope of escape, is that amazingly important national intangible asset called “the commercial common law of England & Wales”. Any time anything goes wrong, or when you’re drawing up documentation to make sure it doesn’t, it’s amazingly useful to be able to make use of all those hundreds of years of precedent. It’s the difference between a well-designed high level programming language, and having to write all your own functions from scratch.

A lot of the reason for not shifting out to the suburbs (for trading at least) is simply telecoms infrastructure. A hell of a lot of the IT talent that’s gone into the City over the last twenty years has gone into the building of what amounts to a very fast, very very reliable specialised telecom system (to replace SWIFT, the previously existing very fast, very very reliable specialised telegram and telex system).

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