Don’t freak out about UK’s vanishing banking jobs

It’s ‘seismic.’ At first glance, last month’s 52 percent decline in the number of job openings in London’s financial industry looks dramatic. In Brexit there’s an easy bogeyman to blame.
But the picture isn’t so clear.
Take the survey that recruiting firm Morgan McKinley, from which that figure comes.
You need to adjust it for seasonality: December is never a busy month for hiring, with the financial year-end approaching and decision makers departing for the holidays. For applicants, there’s little reason to move before your bonus is paid. If you compare the number of vacancies with the previous December, the drop is 37 percent. Painful, but not quite so bad, particularly if you look at it over a longer period of time.
Typically hiring picks up in January and the following months, so the year-on-year comparison for the first-quarter will give a rather more instructive picture of the health of London’s finance industry.
It’s hard, too, to judge how scientific these surveys are. Morgan McKinley doesn’t disclose its sample size, or provide a margin of error for the survey. (To be fair, the firm is confident in its methodology, and it doesn’t claim for a
moment it’s an exact science.)
Nobody is disputing that Brexit will have a long-term impact on employment. Nobody, though, can say for certain what it will be.
Leaving the European Union without a deal could cost half a million jobs, according to a report commissioned by London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Or it could mean London will create 87,000 fewer jobs than it would have done. Or, to look at it another way, London may be the part of the country least damaged by Brexit.
These are all estimates. The data are at best patchy and incomplete. In the febrile Brexit debate,
that isn’t going to stop anyone from using them to reinforce their existing prejudices.

—Bloomberg