While several banks have already said they will move some staff to the likes of Frankfurt and Paris because of the likelihood of the post-Brexit loss of passporting rights that enable them to trade freely throughout Europe, Mr Carney said that the UK would remain one of the few nations able to support and regulate firms involved in complex financial instruments such as derivatives.“The ability to pick that up and move it to another jurisdiction, people, capital, models, collateral – that is a very, very complicated exercise,” he told a press conference in London. “There is huge operational risk involved in that, there is huge financial risk involved in that. It's not something you do overnight.”

'Up to 4 years' to move

Mr Carney described derivatives as a “highly complex, highly interrelated” market that needed to be “intensively, continuously supervised”. He said it could take up to four years for an institution dealing in derivatives to move.“If it is done conveniently with work-arounds, then one is taking a black box risk in the jurisdiction that accepts the work-around,” he added, pointing out that it was home to 40 per cent of the global derivative business.“One thing I know is that the capacity is here, the collateral is here, the people are here, the capital is here, the expertise is here, the supervisory ability is here, the clearing is here,” he said. “So the one jurisdiction that is going to have capacity is the UK.”Meanwhile, Ben Broadbent, Mr Carney's deputy, told the BBC on Friday that he believed Donald Trump's election victory had benefited the British economy “at the margin” by boosting financial markets.

Financial markets 'more optimistic'

While he sounded a note of caution about the long-term effects of some of Mr Trump's stated policies, Mr Broadbent told BBC Breakfast, “You've seen business confidence rise particularly in the United States. You've seen financial markets get more optimistic and I think that has had some impact on us.“So far, at the margin, yes, it's been positive for global sentiment, and for that reason, and to that extent, for us as well.”

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• Brexit News-May rules out single market and free movement
• Government promises Brexit bill within days after court defeat

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But Mr Broadbent said there remained concerns over the new president's protectionist leanings. “There are other things the US administration has said that people may worry more about, or have done in some markets,” he said.“And I should say overall that there's a lot we have yet to see about the detailed plans, including those for fiscal policy, for government spending and taxes and so forth, so we'll have to wait and see.”* The Markit/CIPS purchasing managers' index (PMI) for the UK's all-important services sector showed growth had dropped in January for the first time in four months. The PMI of 54.5 last month was down from December's 15-month high of 56.2. Any figure on the index above 50 indicates growth.Chris Williamson, chief business economist at IHS Markit, said January's fall might be only temporary. “Encouragingly, optimism about the coming year has risen to its highest in one-and-a-half years, improving across the board in all sectors to suggest that January's slowdown may only be temporary,” he said.

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