COMMENTARY / World

Bad news for London and New York: Finance hubs are becoming obsolete

Physical location now matters little as technology and rule changes allow financial firms to spread out

With the COVID-19 pandemic showing businesses that remote work is viable, banks that once concentrated around Wall Street and in other financial hubs have begun to spread out their operations across countries and continents. Bloomberg | BLOOMBERG

By Paul J. Davies
Bloomberg

Jan 5, 2022

Stand on the steps of The Royal Exchange in the heart of the City of London and you can picture the churn of people 200 years ago or more in what was becoming the world’s preeminent financial hub.

Stock jobbers, traders and financiers would stream between its great limestone columns with the Bank of England to one side and all surrounded by offices of bankers or trading houses and alleyways to the ever-busy coffee shops.

The exchange was where transactions happened, but the coffee shops played an equally important role in the lifeblood of markets as information centers. People hung out there for refreshment and gossip but also all the details of supply and demand. "[T]he coffee men vied with each other in maintaining the supply of a wide variety of domestic and foreign newspapers, news-sheets, journals and bulletins, customs entry forms, auction notices, price-current lists, etc,” according to David Kynaston’s "City of London: The History.”