In London, Life is a riot…

Just what is it with socialists and their fixation with London’s financial center?

London is at its highest point in the last 20 years, with the City absolutely booming, new injections of capital into Britain’s largest institutional liquidity firms and an interbank FX sector that is going from strength to strength.

Add this to an ideologically and fiscally conservative government which is backed by some of the country’s most astute businessmen and you have a world city which is now a pinnacle of modernity, a fintech center, and handles 46% of the world’s interbank FX business, as well as the majority of the non-bank B2B liquidity and technology which supplies the entire world’s electronic financial markets.

What’s not to like?

It appears that one million young anarchists and socialists would rather take to the streets to display their contorted faces of anger in their quest to reduce Britain’s epicenter of financial prowess to the primitive levels of some of socialist mainland Europe.

Yesterday, London’s streets were blighted by no less than one million aggressive individuals wearing masks, representing anti-capitalist organizations such as Socialist Worker – although that name is an oxymoron because to most of these individuals, the idea of going to work and earning a living is the very last thing on their minds.

Greece fell not only due to its flawed economic system, but largely due to a populace that believes in free money. There is no such thing as free money, and of course the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have now paid the price for fueling a fire so fierce, and are now exposed to over one third of the entire capitalization of the European Central Bank just from the continual bail-outs that a nation with only 11 million people has required.

When crunch time came, or better still when credit crunch time came, the Greek electorate voted for a rebellious socialist – Alexis Tsipras – who made it very clear that he had no intention of repaying the debts that the country owes, and in fact demanded further funding.

For three years, people rioted on the streets of Athens, burned police cars, threw projectiles at property.

The same has happened in France, Germany and pretty much every other socialist country in Europe with a youth population who have been told by a bearded university lecturer that the entire world owes them a living and that if they don’t get what they ‘deserve’ from the coffers of what is portrayed as an evil conservative government, then they will riot and destroy everything en masse.

At least David Cameron has the common sense to allow China to invest £40 billion in British industry as the tip of the iceberg of what could be a great partnership between China and Britain, and the pathway out of angry, business-unfriendly, technologically outmoded, socialist Europe.

The worst part of all of this is that these so-called middle class university students hold the financial sector and the fiscally sensible government responsible for their own perceived lack of future, when actually it should be the other way around.

No to cuts, they say, whilst destroying public property paid for by taxpayers. The entire ideology is flawed and inherently dangerous.

Without a secure financial sector – and in the case of Britain, it is a world-leading financial sector – and a sensible government, this angry youth can wave goodbye to any notion of security or ability to feed themselves should they succeed in bringing it down or convincing the global firms based in London to uproot and move to America.

It is clear that London’s square mile powers the entire economy in the now prosperous Great Britain. Gone are the days of the shop steward on the factory floor of the car plants in the Midlands, or the printing factories of the West Country, and the textiles and steel industries of the North. Why? Because the socialists and anarchists in the 1970s succeeded in bringing them down, and now destitution reigns supreme in many former industrial towns.

The dichotomy between Central London and the rest of the country has never been greater, as the City’s large FX firms continue to post ever higher volume figures and the smart money from Switzerland, the Far East and North America is now filtering in, rather than just oil wealth from the Middle East with no commercial enterprise behind it as was the case in the late 1990s.

Indeed, just one mile outside of the city of London, things are noticeably different.

Most of the world’s FX industry flocked to London last week and by all accounts a very positive overall outcome was experienced as FX industry executives did business with those from all over the world in what is quite simply one of the best cities in the world in which to do business.

Indeed, last week, London was ranked by many mainstream organizations as the number one worldwide city in which to do any kind of business.

Asia – The Future

Barclays, HSBC and Standard Chartered are global financial giants with their main operations in London. All three have begun to focus their attentions on Asia. Why is that? It is very simple. London’s city may be the home of the sophisticated and is going from strength to strength, led by the industry’s finest from their plate glass offices in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, but clearly there is a large percentage of Britons who are far from sophisticated and are so filled with contempt that they would seek to destroy the prosperity that their own country has created by violence and force.

Asia is not like that. Indeed, China, Hong Kong and Singapore are bastions of good behavior and home to an ambitious youth which is generally very urbane, educated and industrious with impeccable manners and ethics. You only have to take a tour of China’s major cities and visit some of the FX introducing brokers there to realize the extent of possibilities and the welcome that is synonymous with Chinese politeness and respect.

Socialists and anarchists forget one very important thing. The wealthy firms and individuals that they show such contempt for are very international and have choices. Should they focus their attention on a nation whose youth wants to work hard, generate prosperity, sit in meetings and behave with impeccable manners and work together to create prosperity, rather than live in the shadow of a youth culture ready and willing to burn police cars down, throw Molotov cocktails at Buckingham Palace and hit police officers on the head with wooden batons, then all it takes is a quick call to a management consultancy and the switch is made. After all, this is the potential future customer base for such companies.

Those whose tax-payer funded university ‘loan’ that will never be repaid does not extend to some shaving foam and a bar of soap perhaps ought to be careful what they wish for, or it may become a bleak reality.

Photograph courtesy of Daily Mail