There is a new series of Industry coming up, which, as its name does not suggest, is a BBC series about goings-on in the City — or rather in a fictional investment bank, Pierrepoint. This paper billed it as Squid Game without the subtitles: bankers profiting from Covid, badly behaved suits; juniors working all hours on, er, stimulants. There is, it would seem, zero scope for lovable and ethical City people on stage or screen.
This may be why there is so little political will to engage with the crisis in the City. In the manifestos you look in vain for acknowledgment that the London Stock Exchange, the institutional face of the finance sector, is in a bad, bad way. Rather than counting the companies not floating their shares here or transferring their listing abroad, to New York for instance, it saves time to mention the one company that did float here: the computer business, Raspberry Pi. Oh, and Shein, the Chinese online retailer, may list here, which would be huge, except it’s too toxic for New York.
