Paris, Frankfurt welcome Britain's bankers

Banking hasn't been popular among politicians for years. So why are European leaders so keen to woo bankers to their cities? Tax euros!
U.K. finance is a big export to Europe and the companies and people involved pay a lot of tax. About 11% of all U.K. taxes come from the country's finance industry and about 60% of those are paid by employees themselves, according to studies done by the City of London Corporation.
Employees in banking alone paid about GBP18 billion of income taxes in 2014-2015, according to the U.K. tax authorities.

Much of that won't go anywhere. Retail banking accounts for more than two-thirds of employees, according to the British Bankers Association, a trade body. However, commercial and investment bankers are probably paid more on average, so at a conservative estimate, one-third of those taxes, or GBP6 billion, might be paid by them.
So how many might move? HSBC's chairman, Douglas Flint, has said about 1,000 of its investment banking staff, or 17%, would shift to Paris in the case of a hard Brexit. Analysts at Jefferies, meanwhile, reckon up to 100,000 jobs from all financial industries could move from the U.K. to Europe.
Whether any jobs move will be highly uncertain for some time yet. But if they do, it is quite easy to see how employees alone could bring hundreds of millions of extra euros with them.
No wonder finance suddenly has new friends in Paris and Frankfurt.
Write to Paul J. Davies at paul.davies@wsj.com