ABSTRACT
A basic feature of contemporary global finance is that there are three interlinked time zones centring on North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. People in these zones prefer to work during daylight hours, which means that there is only limited or no time overlap between them. Various scale economies promote the existence of a dominant hub within each central time zone. The overwhelming size of the US economy within the American zone has made the national centre, New York, the zonal hub. Within the European zone the pre-eminence of London has been more open to challenge because of the smaller size of the UK economy. This weakness has been compensated by an inherited skill base and a conscious policy to preserve as much of the traditional position as possible. In Asia Pacific, Japan repeats the American pattern by generating some 60 per cent of the time zone’s aggregate GDP. It is natural then that the national hub Tokyo is seen as the third pole of the global order.
