If I were a mastermind seeking to undermine the City of London, I would shift Germany’s financial centre from Frankfurt to Berlin, just as the country moved its political capital from Bonn in the 1990s. Then it would be part of a cosmopolitan city where foreign bankers and lawyers might actually want to live.

It won’t happen but other European laws and regulations have put the 50-year expansion of the City as the world’s leading international financial centre in jeopardy. It faces a future where it may neither exist comfortably as Europe’s financial centre, nor as an offshore centre for global capital from the US, Asia and emerging markets.

The City has faced turning points before: in 1914, when the first world war ended the global expansion of the Victorian era; in 1963, when the US government’s tax on purchases of foreign securities revived it through the eurobond market; in 1986, when the Big Bang deregulation of the City made it the natural entrep?t for European and US banks.