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Comment by rosndo | Hacker News Reader

London is also popular because it is the best city in the world to live in if you have a lot of money. London has been very important for a very very long time.

This may even play a bigger part than any regulatory environment, especially in a world where English is the lingua franca.

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> London has been very important for a very very long time.

This seems like a critical component. In the US or Canada, there is no "old money" in the European-magnitude sense.

In the UK, on the other hand, there are a lot of structures that seem to straddle oligarchy and democracy (see: accuser burden of proof libel laws mentioned in article). There are not just different options for ultra wealthy, but experienced options, staffed by people who have been doing this for decades, at firms who have been doing this for centuries.

Opaque South Dakota trusts look quaint against that depth of historically-earned competency.

But no US or Canadian city can compete on quality of life even if you fully ignore all the financial infrastructure.

Cities in the US or Canada that offer comparable accommodation, eating and shopping opportunities are pretty miserable places to live in. Central London is beautiful, green and wonderful to walk around. It takes a very specific kind of person to enjoy walking around Manhattan on a regular basis.

London is also conveniently located wrt. top holiday destinations like the Alps and south of France.

London offers so much more to the oligarchy than just banks and lawyers.

Fuck, what other cities reliably offer Uber Lux? And I don’t mean the watered down American version with Suburbans and the likes.

The oligarchs will still remain in London even if draconian KYC laws might force them to rent instead of own, there aren’t any realistic alternatives.

Of course the “normies” will never understand this, they can’t even imagine the lifestyle. They have no idea what other great cities lack, because they’d never even dream of needing such services.

It is a little bit of both influencing each other, but the system in London is definitely the killer app. My understanding of the history is that there are systems that have been entrenched in the London financial industry going back centuries due to the unique history of the City of London and how it administrates itself separately from the rest of England/ GB. It was the global hub during pax brittania, and remained the financial hub of the world after the war thanks to the Eurodollar. It was at this point that tax systems were devised involving their crown dependencies to obfuscate everything which made it a popular place to launder money. A lot of the opulence has developed along side over all these years.

So it was the case that London was the city of the world during the empire which made it the candidate for running the Eurodollar system to rebuild Europe which cemented its place as the financial capital of the world up until America financialized their economy in the late 70s, its colonies allowed for unique tax systems which made it even more popular.

I got most of this from the book entitled Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, and the documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8 that was inspired by it.

> It is a little bit of both influencing each other, but the system in London is definitely the killer app

I’m super unconvinced this is true. I know many “oligarchs” living in London, most of them do not keep their money in the UK.

I think the people writing about London from a tax haven/money laundering perspective tend to have rather little insight into the quality of life aspect. It’s easy for them to mistakenly assume that the system is the main draw, but the reality on the ground seems rather different.

For very rich people that want to live in a city, London is absolutely the #1 destination.

I am not saying the reason London in popular is only because of laundering, it is self evident that it is one of the major cosmopolitan metro areas in the world, but I am saying for launderers, London is a top destination. They have been the capital for the financial world for well over a century, you could even say the first globalized world with the Empire, with that there is a lot of money in the city, a lot of money in the city naturally creates the amenities, infrastructure, institutions and lifestyles that appeal and cater to that money over time (laundering being just one of those things), which in turn makes the city more attractive to people with money, creating a virtuous cycle. London exists at the intersection of new and old world globalism, no other city has even been in the game long enough to even compare.

the usual polls show Vienna being the best big city to live in, and for smaller cities there's always the Riviera or Marbella ahead.

Those polls are for poor people.

I can tell you from experience that Vienna is a shithole compared to London if you have a 100k+/mo budget.

If you're stupid wealthy you're not really tied to one place. Maybe london is the only place that has underground cabals that will torture a child in front of you for a million dollars, but nobody wants to torture children every day. The rest of the days, maybe you want to relax in a mountain villa somewhere warmer with nice ocean breezes and lots of sun.

This. London is a good city but being a finance hub that is friendly to outside investment is the real draw. There are other cities with much better architecture, food, art, culture, etc than London but I doubt anyone in Europe is better at providing financial services and to extreme wealth.

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