London has long been the stock-trading center of Europe, but post-Brexit losses continue to siege traditionally strong British industries. From the Financial Times:
Amsterdam surpassed London as Europe’s largest share trading centre last month as the Netherlands scooped up business lost by the UK since Brexit.
An average €9.2bn shares a day were traded on Euronext Amsterdam and the Dutch arms of CBOE Europe and Turquoise in January, a more than fourfold increase from December. The surge came as volumes in London fell sharply to €8.6bn, dislodging the UK from its historic position as the main hub for the European market, according to data from CBOE Europe.
The shift was prompted by a ban on EU-based financial institutions trading in London because Brussels has not recognised UK exchanges and trading venues as having the same supervisory status as its own.
Without this so-called equivalence to ease cross-border dealing, there was an immediate shift of €6.5bn of deals to the EU when the Brexit transition period concluded at the end of last year. It was about half of the amount of business that London banks and brokers would normally handle.
This happened only 1 month after Brexit went into effect. Other industries have seen even worse consequences:
GDP was down 2.9% in January as the supply chains have been thrown into havoc and business disruptions have been described as "endemic," and it turns out the
government didn't do an economic assessment on the trade deal despite it being the most consequential trade agreement in memory. It's one thing to have the economy torpedoed by global macro economic conditions, it's an entirely different one to steer the ship headlong into the iceberg as Britain has done.
Fishery sports are nothing to UK's economy, the impact on the City is going to be severe short term but my take is that UK will de-regulate, which was the Brexit plan anyway. That should bring enough business back to recover. Regarding exports, there is a short term impact on business due to new red-tape but that should be shorted with a little bit of time.
The problem has not been as much brexit as the double punch with COVID. Just think of it, if you could choose, you would have brexited better any other year. Those figures and the supply chains issues are basically related to COVID, not brexit.
Considering Covid has been present for a year and the drop happened not this whole time but specifically after Brexit went into effect, this is not convincing. These drops are specifically Brexit-related, not Covid-related.
Perhaps fishing isn't overall a large part of the UK economy, but any industry that drops 83% is going to decimate the businesses in it. In 2019,
UK exported 2 billion pounds worth of fish. An 83% drop in exports will prove devastating if it doesn't recover throughout the rest of the year.
