This paper traces the location of foreign banks in Germany from 1949 to 2006. As suggested by new economic geography models we find a 'u'-shaped concentration of foreign banks in Germany. Only after a competition between several cities, Frankfurt has emerged as the pre-eminent financial centre,...

In this paper, we first discuss the notion of important financial centres and the socioeconomic and political conditions which need to be fulfilled for such a centre to exist. We then address the issue of the so-called end of geographyʺ which has attracted a lot of attention recently. Under...

International financial centres used to be stable economic clusters held together by the centripetal forces emanating from physical exchanges. However, given near complete ‘virtualisation', these ‘anchors' have gradually disappeared. As this article demonstrates, this has had telling...