Yeah, the point I was more trying to make (but didn't explain very well) is that the debt being handled was primarily American, and although a lot of British banks were involved in handling that debt, reducing the size of the City of London (as was being argued would be a good thing in this thread) wouldn't have meant that American banks (and EU ones) would've suddenly stopped dealing in that debt (if we imagine a scenario 10 years ago where London had a reduced financial services industry). I guess you could maybe make a case for saying that fewer players = less systematic risk as I doubt the remaining banks would've increased their risk to take up the equivalent deals vacated by the reduced UK banks, but I don't know enough about the debt figures for each bank to really quantify that.
It's a weird one for me regards to the City of London & Brexit. I live quite close to the City, so selfishly I don't want it to boom currently as I want to buy a property around here / have younger siblings here too, which maybe leaving the single market would help with. But then looking past my own personal interests, long-term obviously wouldn't want the City to lose it's competitive advantage for London and the country as a whole. If there was a way to quantify how many jobs stand to be lost in total relative to the total remaining size of financial services (everything not being moved elsewhere / not related to the EU), and then also estimate how much business say over the next 10-30 years would go to EU cities that could've come here instead, that would help me forming a more informed opinion. (Was reading a post on Quora that sort of does that, but obviously opinionated:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-inevita...e-world-following-Brexit/answer/Barney-Lane-1) Right now I'm in the weird camp of being afraid of a major long-term weakening but also thinking we could tough it out / selfishly wanting the short-term shocks. Imo just remaining in the singles market and customs union looks like it would be the easiest solution to everything, but then you're no longer able to regulate immigration so you hit another stumbling block.