Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

for exports to the rest of Europe. By 2015, 3.2 million EU citizens were living in the UK, of whom 2.3 million had jobs, 7 percent of the workforce; 1.2 million UK citizens lived permanently in the EU. Of course trade, investment and migration would have happened between the UK and Europe whether or not the UK was a member of the EU. But how much? According to the best guesses of the economists, trade with other EU members was 55 percent greater than one would have expected without EU membership.27 For the City the questions were even more acute. Tens of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds in business depended on the so-called passporting arrangements, which allowed banks in London to operate as though they were inside the eurozone. It was a convenient fiction for European, British, American and Asian financial firms. It was not a concession that London could hope to maintain if it was no longer even a member of the EU.