[rayiner]

London was a banking capital long before the EU existed. And Hong Kong became a banking capital under British governance.

Look at it another way. Europe has been unable to recreate Silicon Valley. What makes you think it'll be so easy to recreate the City?

[jacquesm]

Europe has been unable to recreate Silicon Valley for a large number of reasons none of which have anything to do with why they can't move their financial center to Frankfurt.

Just a couple of them:

- no single language market of 300M people

- different attitude towards investment

- different attitude towards entrepreneurship

- no reason to cluster that much in such a small space

In fact, the US has been unable to 'recreate Silicon Valley', it's a world-wide accidental one-off and drawing parallels between its one-off-existence, lack of being replicated anywhere at all and the fact that London was a banking capital before the EU existed does nothing to guarantee Londons continued existence as a banking capital outside an otherwise unified EU once a large number of very relevant parties pulls out and is drawing very strange conclusions out of unrelated data.

The biggest hits from the brexit will be felt in London and it is already happening.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/24/london-brexit-jobs/

[rayiner]

> Europe has been unable to recreate Silicon Valley for a large number of reasons none of which have anything to do with why they can't move their financial center to Frankfurt.

I'd argue that a lot of the reasons overlap. The key ones being: pre-existing access to capital, access to talent, and tolerance for risk-taking.

[jacquesm]

Capital is very easy to move (and is already moving), banking talent is not rare and tolerance for risk taking? We're talking about banking here. The tolerance for risk taking in banking goes just so far that you are not fired if the risk is covered before you are found out. Start-ups and banking have very little to do with each other.

I'd like to see a start-up succeed under the kind of risk-averse attitude that's prevalent in a bank and the kind of reporting duties they have.

Note that NYC is the banking center of the United States (and to some extent of the world) and that NYC also did not manage to re-create Silicon Valley.

[rayiner]

20-somethings at Wall Street and City firms are making billion dollar trades--ones where even a small amount of risk can yield huge losses. That takes an appetite for risk. Those firms have pipelines funneling in the top graduates from the top schools. They've got access to (rare) talent. They've got the connections with individual and institutional investors that can raise billions of dollars on tight timelines to finance mergers, acquisitions, or expansion. That's access to capital that could move but isn't necessarily going to. And they've got a well-developed supporting infrastructure of accountants, lawyers, and analysts helping to keep the gears turning.

You can't easily recreate that somewhere else.

[pm90]

These are good points and I don't understand the downvotes. Silicon Valley is great ecosystem for startups but once they start to grow big, they do need financial services from the many many firms on wall street. That is a different kind of talent and I think SV (and perhaps HN as well) fails to understand the importance of the availability of capital instruments and prudent financial advice that is available so easily just across the country.