JP Morgan has plans in place to move work from Germany to the United Kingdom amid fears of power blackouts, according to reports, years after moving billions of dollars worth of assets from London to Frankfurt due to Brexit, Daily Mail reported.
The plans are part of emergency measures drawn up by the Wall Street bank to ensure it can continue to trade if Europe’s largest economy loses power this winter, following Vladimir Putin’s decision to cut Russian gas supplies to the continent.
Russian flows of gas via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline remained at zero on Tuesday, with Putin saying they would only resume if western sanctions – imposed over his on-going invasion of Ukraine – are lifted.
The pipeline historically supplied about a third of the gas exported by Russia to Europe but was running at only 20 per cent of capacity before the outage last week, Daily Mail reported.
JP Morgan was one of several financial institutions to move assets out of the UK in the wake of the country’s decision to leave the European Union.
In September 2020, the US bank announced it was moving about 200 billion Euros (around ?211 billion at the time) from the UK to Germany. It also greatly expanded its operations in Paris. This followed similar moves by other big banks in Britain, such as Barclays, which moved almost 200 billion Euros in assets to Dublin.
But JP Morgan is considering to return some of its operations to the City of London as it works to protect itself from potential fallout of the current chaos in the European markets, where steep increases in the price of energy in the wake of the Russian invasion have put pressure on households and sent the pace of consumer price rises to new highs, Daily Mail reported.
Eurozone inflation hit 9.1 per cent in August, a record in the history of the single currency and well above the two-per cent rate targeted by the ECB.
