All told, in 2007 the City of London was home to 250 foreign banks and bank branches, twice as many as operated out of New York.33 But the European footprint in Wall Street was very substantial. Of the top twenty broker-dealers in New York, twelve were foreign owned and held 50 percent of the assets.34 These were the competitors in the top tier. But European financial adventurism came in all shapes and sizes. And it was not confined to the City of London–Wall Street axis. From the 1980s Dublin set out to establish itself as a low-tax, low-regulation jurisdiction, attracting bankers from Europe
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