London

Most notably companies that used to deal on behalf of customers now do it for themselves. This ‘proprietary trading’ by the big investment banks like Goldman Sachs has radically upsized the scale of the game. Hedge funds and private equity firms hell-bent on challenging the norm have also rewritten the rules.Oiling the cogs is an army of attendant lawyers, accountants, IT professionals, headhunters, marketing and PR executives – all there to make sure that a deal is a deal, that the numbers are made to add up, that the computer ‘plumbing’ vital to the actual operation of the City actually works and that whatever you are doing is presented in the best possible light to your clients, business partners, our politicians, the media and the public at large. Feature continues

Putting numbers on all this can send your head spinning. As the world’s biggest foreign exchange centre some $750bn changes hands in the City every day. Over $3,000bn-worth of metals are traded here every year; as the world’s leading international insurance market London takes more than £150bn in worldwide premium income. There is three trillion pounds of funds under management in London – of which some over $225bn are in the hands of hedge funds. Ironically, for all it contributes to the UK, the City itself is quite un-British. The huge influx of foreign banks and finance companies following Big Bang saw most local operators taken over or sidelined. City workers are also now a diverse bunch. A Spanish graduate from a US university working for an Australian-owned bank that specialises in buying UK and continental infrastructure assets is not unusual.

Elsewhere – France, or even for all its free-marketing way the US – it is hard to imagine such a situation being tolerated. Here, however, the talk is of the benefits of ‘Wimbledonisation’ – most of the players are foreign but the tournament gets staged here. Much of the money that washes through the City is also international as open markets bring in cash from all over the globe which is then repackaged and directed on towards ventures elsewhere. Recent years have seen an influx of Russian business and money. Now there is much excitement about what riches may come out of the oil-rich parts of Central Asia. ‘Those are the pots that everyone wants to get their hands on,’ says one senior broker, before adding that ‘uncertainties’ about the origin of some of the money presents risks in terms on compliance with money-laundering rules.

Who runs it all? There are powerful bodies that dominate particular areas of business – Goldman for equities, for instance, or Willis in insurance – and institutions such as the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange and the government and its regulatory agencies have considerable influence and power.