Why A UK Billionaire Believes Brexit Would Be "Good For The UK"

The City of London and the pound would both benefit from the U.K. leaving the EU, says billionaire Peter Hargreaves. Brexit may knock the pound initially, but it would rebound, the co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown — the largest U.K. retail broker, with more than $84.1 billion equivalent in assets — told Bloomberg Briefs' Geoff King in a June 17 interview.

Q: Why do you support "Leave"?

A: Every year in the EU it gets more political, it gets more legislative, more regulative; we don’t seem to get very much benefit from it. We will be far better out. The EU as an economic mark is declining in the world, when there were only nine countries in it was 30 percent of the world's GDP, now there are 28 it is only 17 percent. That's some serious decline. Other countries that are growing — India, parts of Africa, Brazil, China and even Russia — are the places we should be trading with.

Q: How do you counter strong economist/analyst support to remain?

A: There's a huge amount of vested interest, a lot people making these comments are politically motivated and also work for big banks that aren’t British. They’ve built these enormous dealing rooms and offices in the City of London and Canary Wharf and their bosses are saying we don't want to endanger this huge investment of ours. I don't think it will endanger that huge investment. You can't move the City of London to anywhere else in Europe. It's madness to suggest it. Frankfurt, the place everybody keeps talking about, only has a population of 700,000, it could not accommodate anything like the City of London. The City of London is absolutely guaranteed, it is bound to survive. The only center that could take over would be Zurich and that's not in the EU either. It's absolute drivel that the City of London will be affected. The City of London will go out and it will deal with these emerging economies in the Pacific Basin, Southeast Asia, Africa —  they're all going to want finance for different things. You can't set up the City of London anywhere else. It takes years, and during that time the City of London will have grown stronger. Any attempt at usurping it will fail.

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