From high up in their towers some 90,000 bankers look down on the Thames as it meanders past what was, in living memory, the world's busiest port. Six decades ago these shores saw a daily tide of vessels from the world's biggest merchant fleet, built in the world's most productive shipyards and supported by the world's major shipping insurers, bankers and lawyers. Today, little of this great port remains beyond the colourful names of the docks and piers where steamers and clippers once moored: Canary Wharf, Canada Square, or the West India Quay. That Britain's most successful industry-its biggest exporter, taxpayer and provider of well-paid jobs-has risen from the ashes of another is an accident of history. Yet it is also a reminder that market dominance can be ephemeral. And it explains much of the anxiety in the City, as London's financial district is called, that financial services are under attack.
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