Claim 1d93c21bChecked 09 Jul 2026
Partly True/FalseOn the truth scale
“In the Eighties and Nineties, London became in many ways a genuine global centre for creating profits.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
London did become more globally central to finance in the 1980s and 1990s: the Bank of England described London in 1989 as a world financial centre, HMRC says the 1986 "Big Bang" reforms transformed the London Stock Exchange, and UK Parliament records in 1990 said those changes had consolidated London as the great world financial centre in its time zone. (bankofengland.co.uk) But the wording is overstated if it implies London only became a major global financial centre in that era; the Bank of England later noted that London had remained a leading international financial and banking centre even after the Second World War, and that its re-emergence had started before the EU single market. (bankofengland.co.uk) Sources: Bank of England, "London as an international financial centre"; HMRC/GOV.UK, "Financial markets: background: big bang"; UK Parliament Hansard, "Financial Services And The Single European Market"; Bank of England, "The City's Growth: The Crest of a Wave or Swimming with the Stream?"; Bank of England, "Governance of financial globalisation".
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened+ 34 search hits considered
| [1] | bankofengland.co.uk |
| [2] | bankofengland.co.uk |