This is what Lloyd Blankfein said
The chief executive of Goldman Sachs believes that London “will stall” because of risks coming from the Brexit process.
Lloyd Blankfein has said the firm which employs 6,500 people in the UK has plans to move staff depending on the outcome of negotiations.
Blankfein said he hopes that the bank will not have to trigger these “contingency plans”.
Blankfein was speaking in an interview with the BBC, he spoke about how both sides in the Brexit negotiations were playing for very high economic stakes.He believes there needs to be an implementation period of at least “a couple of years”.
He said: “We are talking about the long-term stability of huge economies with hundreds of millions of people and livelihoods at stake and huge gross domestic product,”
He also said there was the risk of banks having a “smaller footprint” in Britain.
“Obviously, a lot of people elect to have their European business concentrated in a single place, and the easiest place, certainly, for the biggest economy in the world [America] to concentrate would be the UK – the culture, the language, the special relationship, and we are an example of that,”
“The UK has a big history – certainly in financial services – of managing markets and having a fair system that makes it very attractive, but it extends to other industries as well.
“And if you cannot benefit from access to the EU from the UK – and nobody knows what those rules and determinations will be – then the risk is there will be some adjustment that will cause some people to have a smaller footprint in the UK.”
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