UK Treasury privately asks banks not to go public about post-EU fears

The Financial Times reports that international banks in London are under pressure by the Treasury to “paint a rosier picture of the City’s future” following the UK referendum vote to leave the EU. The newspaper reports, too, that the Treasury has also “urged British banks to refrain from public proclamations about any dire consequences from Brexit”.

It reports:

Officials asked international banks to sign a “more optimistic” joint statement than the one eventually published last Thursday and said banks and the Treasury would “work together … to help London retain its position as the leading international financial centre”.

Banks resisted, arguing that they were “not cheerleaders”, one of the people present said. The Treasury declined to comment.

Senior bankers are themselves upset at JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon’s raising the prospect of big job cuts in the UK, where his operation employs 16,000. One senior banker said Mr Dimon’s comments are “deeply unhelpful for our cause”.

Dimon last week addressed his UK staff at a meeting in London and reassured them about the City’s future as a big centre for his bank. But he told an Italian newspaper on 7 July 7 that JPMorgan could be forced to move thousands of staff out of the UK if the country loses its automatic right to sell financial services to the EU.

UBS investment bank chief Andrea Orcel has also told Bloomberg that “most probably we would need to consider moving a number of our employees to an EU country”. The numbers moving would be a “significant percentage” of UBS’s 5,000-strong London workforce, he said.

After the referendum result, Deutsche Bank chief executive John Cryan said: “We cannot fully foresee the consequences, but there’s no doubt that they will be negative on all sides”.

The Treasury has met the CEOs of the large UK banks and the CEOs of large international banks separately to reassure them that the UK will do what it can to protect financial services, the Financial Times reports. UK bank bosses were asked not to go public about moving jobs away from Britain until the UK government is more stable and the basis for negotiations with Europe is clearer.

Before the referendum, Jamie Dimon had warned that leaving the EU would mean “a terrible deal for the British economy”. And as late as last week he said of the outcome “there’s nothing wrong with changing your mind”.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase