倫敦仍將是全球性金融中心

When it comes to leaving a city, companies and markets are very different creatures. Companies will shift from one global city to another in search of a more favourable tax regime or more beneficial employment law. For markets — particularly complex ones with strategic functions — it is much harder to move wholesale. The City of London is such a market.

談到離開一個城市，企業和市場是截然不同的。企業從一個全球性城市遷往另一個全球性城市，是爲了尋求更有利的稅收或僱傭法規。對於市場——特別是具備戰略性功能的複雜市場——而言，整體遷移就困難多了。倫敦金融城(City of London)就是這樣一個市場。

Given London’s uncertain status following the Brexit vote, the predictions about the effect on Hong Kong’s financial market when China was about to take over sovereignty from the British in 1997 are useful. Beijing aimed to make Shanghai China’s main financial centre. The idea was that important Hong Kong markets would migrate to the mainland. That did not happen. Hong Kong is still China’s most international and strongest market. Shanghai, meanwhile, did expand as a financial centre but one geared more towards domestic investors.

鑑於英國脫歐公投後倫敦地位的不確定性，我們不妨參考1997年中國從英國手中收回香港主權之前，有關香港迴歸對香港金融市場影響的預測。中國政府原本計劃將上海打造爲中國主要金融中心，具體思路是讓香港的重要市場遷移到內地。可是後來並沒有出現這種局面。香港仍是中國國際化程度最高、實力最強的市場。與此同時，上海確實發展成爲一個金融中心，但更多是服務於國內投資者。

One possible outcome for London of leaving the EU is that more routine functions, such as euro clearing, move elsewhere while the more complex markets remain. This possibility is supported by the fact that vital to the more complex London markets are strategic intermediate functions that depend on a mix of very specific types of companies and skills. This is a deeply networked function — that is, companies need each other because each individual company has only partial knowledge or highly specialist capabilities. No single business can give the leading financial centres everything it needs, as the corporate behemoths than once ruled these economies did in the 1960s and 1970s.

倫敦脫離歐盟後，一個可能的結果是較常規的功能（例如歐元清算）將遷往別處，而更復雜的市場仍留在原地。以下事實支持這種可能性：對於倫敦一些較複雜的市場而言，至關重要的是戰略性中介功能，這些功能依賴於多種多樣的公司和技能的組合。這是一種密切相聯的功能，即企業彼此需要，因爲每家公司只擁有部分知識或非常專業的能力。沒有一家公司能夠提供主要金融中心所需的一切，這不同於上世紀六、七十年代企業巨擘在這些經濟中占主導地位的情形。

It is wrong to think, as many do, that our global cities are about headquarters. One feature of the globalisation that took off in the 1980s is the rise of strategic intermediate sectors, with a vital role for finance and innovative legal, accounting and digital techniques. If a business operates in 20, 30 or more countries it can no longer hire full-time staff for all its high-level know-ledge needs. If you want to do deals in Mongolia and you need 30 hours of Mongolian legal, accounting and financial advice, you buy a service, you do not hire staff. What you need is access to important markets that enable this. Our globalised economy has raised the importance of intermediation to un-precedented levels, and financial centres are the Silicon Valleys of this domain.

很多人認爲，全球性城市的關鍵在於其總部功能，這種觀點是錯誤的。上世紀80年代開始的全球化的一個特點是戰略性媒介行業的興起，金融以及創新性法律、會計和數字化技術發揮着至關重要的作用。如果一家公司在二三十個或者更多國家開展業務，那麼它無法再聘用全職員工來滿足其所有高級知識需要。如果你要在蒙古談交易，你需要得到30個小時的有關蒙古法律、會計和金融方面的建議，那麼你會購買服務，而不是聘用員工。你所需要的是你要能進入可提供這些服務的重要市場。我們的全球化經濟把媒介的重要性提高到了空前水平，金融中心成爲了這個領域的硅谷。

The rise of intermediation as an essential part of our increasingly globalised economy also explains the rapid increase in the number of global cities from the 1990s onwards. Today, we can identify 100 or more such centres, albeit with very diverse powers to shape broad global trends and very diverse capacities to develop and invent new instruments. One, mostly overlooked, fact is that even minor global cities have invented new instruments and built new markets, often based on a single commodity — as with Buenos Aires and sunflowers, for instance.

媒介發展成爲我們日益全球化的經濟中的重要組成部分，也解釋了自上世紀90年代以來全球性城市的迅速增多。如今，我們可以列出100個甚至更多的全球性城市，不過它們在塑造全球性趨勢方面的影響力千差萬別，開發創造新工具的能力也是各不相同。一個被大多數人忽視的事實是，即便是規模較小的全球性城市也發明了新的工具、建立起了新的市場（通常基於某種單一大宗商品），比如布宜諾斯艾利斯的向日葵市場。

The global city function is made over time, and the process of making it is complex and multi-faceted. And, even though it is highly digitised, it is situated in concrete places.

全球性城市的功能是隨着時間推移逐漸發展起來的，這個發展過程是複雜且多方面的。而且，儘管實現了高度數字化，但它們仍然坐落於實實在在的地面之上。

This also explains the proliferation of global financial centres. We could have moved towards one global superfinancial centre, as many in the late 1980s thought we would. I did not. At the time, I saw three rising global financial centres — New York, London and Tokyo — that were, crucially, quite different from one another. Eventually we saw a proliferation of global financial centres, each with its own specific specialised strengths. In Europe alone, London, Frankfurt and Paris are the leading centres, but they are very different in terms of specialist capacities.

這還解釋了全球性金融中心的增多。就像上世紀80年代末很多人設想的那樣，我們本來可能已遷往一個全球性的超級金融中心。我沒這麼想。當時，我看到3個新崛起的全球金融中心——紐約、倫敦和東京——重要的是他們各不相同。最後，我們看到全球金融中心不斷增多，每個都有着自己獨特的專業優勢。僅就歐洲來說，倫敦、法蘭克福和巴黎都是領先金融中心，但從專業能力來看，它們迥然不同。

It makes one think that it is to Frankfurt’s advantage to keep London’s most complex financial functions in London.

這會讓人們認爲，將倫敦最複雜的金融功能繼續留在倫敦對法蘭克福是有利的。