Chris Neal retired from fixed income and derivatives broking in the City in 1999. He is now CEO of the charity GB Job Clubs and administers The Jericho Fund, a micro finance project. This platform piece takes the form of "an open letter to Britain's political leaders".
Gentlemen,
We have endured a torrid time of late and appear to be in the process of throwing the baby out with the bath water. For years now we have benefited from a robust and thriving financial services sector. City firms contributed £67.8billion to tax coffers in 2007 but this had already dropped to £32.5billion to the end of March 2009. Arguably this is the most transportable global business; consequently droves of hedge funds and private equity firms are relocating to jurisdictions with tax friendly regimes.
Well chaps, let me make this clear: we are losing these tax revenues and the high earning individuals that spend lavishly on smart homes and consumer lifestyle - which benefits society as a whole. These guys have had enough. They are not all responsible for what happened, yet the knock-on effect of their departure is plain to see but you are all ignoring it: choosing to kill the golden goose with higher taxes and by handing over regulation to an unelected Brussels elite.
Bankers have been demonised and admittedly a few in the industry share culpability for the credit crisis. But let us not forget that the regulatory framework in which they operated was a self serving system that encouraged profligacy. The more they traded, the greater the sophistication of the derivatives and the more the Exchequer benefited.
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