| > The individual cities aren't all that big, but they are clustered in metropolitan areas. That's the same everywhere. London is a cluster. My suburb of London itself has about a dozen town centres. > Frankfurt is first and foremost a banking city (and secondly an airport city) That's great for employers, awful for employees. > If you live in the vicinity of Frankfurt, you can just drive to Heidelberg for a Saturday night out (about an hour) Driving for an hour is not attractive for going out whe working long hours. This is why you see bankers paying millions of pounds for small flats in London Docklands so they are close to both work and nightlife. People who are used to walking distance or a few minutes on the underground to get to work and the same to get to restaurants and nightclubs are not going to be impressed by an hour to get someone interesting. > Equally, the pool of support staff you can draw from isn't recruited from the minuscule population of Frankfurt (700k), but from the whole metro region (5.5 million). Nobody cares about the support staff. They're easy to hire and cheap. The banks cares about the traders they pay a million plus in base salary and similar levels in bonuses. If they are willing to move to Frankfurt, the banks will go there. If they say "no, I'll just go to bank Y instead - they have an office in Paris," the banks will go to Paris. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the bank my ex works for maintains several offices because of individual traders that insist on living in specific places and who bring enough business to justify it. > If banks want to exert some influence over policy there, they have all the leverage they could want. This is not the case in Paris. Banks have plenty of leverage in London, which is much larger than both Paris and Frankfurt combined. If anything they will have more leverage in Paris because Frankfurt is real competition for Paris in a way neither Paris or Frankfurt has been for London. |