Would you swap the City of London for Paris, or maybe Madrid?
This, apparently, is what's on the cards. At the weekend, The Telegraph cited a 'senior director' of a bank, who said he expects to move as many 200 staff to Paris over the coming year.
Separately, the Independent reported that Goldman Sachs has been threatening to deprive the UK of some of its tax contribution by moving 20% of the 5,000 people it employs in London to Madrid.
With Goldman expected to pay around 433k a head this year, this would imply a cut of around 171m in employee income tax and national insurance contributions alone.
Are Madrid and Paris really so appealing, however?
Although taxes in Paris will soon be lower than in London and the bonus tax there is considerably less restrictive, not all bankers on our French site rate their home country.
"French people go back to France to take a badly paid job (€70k) with little or no bonus, and to live an easy life of 35 hour weeks and 10 weeks' holiday a year," said one in response to a recent article. "It's about spending time with your wife and baby."
Equally, if the British government is demonstrating a remarkable willingness to demonize and penalize bankers, who's to say the Spanish government won't feel the need to do the same. Spain is currently nursing a budget deficit of around 10%. By 2013 it needs to cut that to just 3% if it's to satisfy the EU's deficit rule.
