Brexit exodus starts with a trickle as some say banks bluffing

Depending on who you talk to, 232,000 UK jobs will be headed out the door after Britain withdraws from the European Union. Or it could be as few as 4,000.

The range of forecasts — from the apocalyptic vision of London Stock Exchange Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Xavier Rolet to the conservative estimate, from management consultants Oliver Wyman — often says more about the interests of the people making them than the likely fallout from Britain’s divorce with the EU. As details of the banks’ contingency arrangements become clearer, the initial people moves they are planning are said to be more in the hundreds than the thousands.

The truth is no one knows how many jobs will leave the City of London and Canary Wharf, the two main financial districts. What the UK capital will look like after Brexit, and which services banks will be able to provide EU clients from bases in the city, depends on what deal Prime Minister Theresa May wrings from her 27 EU partners. Filling the information void in the meantime are finance executives, lobbyists and politicians jockeying for influence over the makeup of that final agreement.

Bank bosses with their European headquarters in London are among the most vocal. They have the most to lose if UK-based firms are stripped of their passporting rights — the ability of companies authorised in one EU country to sell their products freely throughout the $19-trillion economic bloc.”They are a bit like dogs backed into a corner and barking — it’s just noise,” said Jason Kennedy, chief executive officer of Kennedy Group, a London-based recruitment firm for the finance industry. “This is all about applying as much pressure as possible on the government to get the best deal. What have the banks have got to lose? Scream the house down and see what happens.”

Few are more outspoken than JPMorgan Chase & Co’s CEO, Jamie Dimon. Before the June 23 referendum he told UK staff that as many as 4,000 of them could be relocated in the event of Brexit. In January, he said that number could be even higher — or lower — depending on how the Brexit negotiations played out.

That same month, he told May at a meeting of non-UK bank chiefs in Davos, Switzerland, that she needed to secure a lengthy transition period guaranteeing ongoing access for all UK companies to the single market. Without it, banks, insurance companies and asset managers would head for the exit, with London’s Michelin-starred restaurants and other service industries not far behind, according to a person briefed on the discussion.HSBC Holdings Plc CEO Stuart Gulliver has taken a similarly hard line. He laid out plans more than a year ago to move of the bank’s London-based investment banking staff to Paris. While he’s repeated the claim often since, the bank has yet to contact any of the affected employees, Gulliver said last week.

“Each business lobby is motivated — the worse you can make it sound at this point, the more likely your sector will get special treatment,” said Thomas Sampson, assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics. “I don’t know how analytically rigorous a lot of the numbers are. You want to take a lot of these numbers with a grain of salt.”