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The chief executive of Goldman Sachs has warned that London’s financial centre will “stall” as a result of Brexit.

Lloyd Blankfein, who runs the world's second largest investment bank, also said the firm had “contingency" plans to move staff out of the capital and into the EU.

He was speaking after banking giant JP Morgan confirmed this week that up to 1,000 jobs will be moved out of London in a bid to secure EU business after Brexit.

Mr Blankfein told the BBC that London's position as a dominant financial centre could even "backtrack" as a result of Britain's divorce from the EU.

He said: “It will stall, it might backtrack a bit, it just depends on a lot of things about which we are uncertain and I know there isn’t certainty at the moment."

International banks would look to reduce their footprint in Britain if they could not benefit from access to the EU's Single Market, he added.

He said: "A lot of people elect to have their European business concentrated in a single place, and the easiest place, certainly, for the biggest economy in the world [the US] to concentrate would be the UK - the culture, the language, the special relationship, and we are an example of that.

"And if you cannot benefit from access to the EU from the UK - and nobody knows what those rules and determinations will be - then the risk is there will be some adjustment that will cause some people to have a smaller footprint in the UK.

"Without knowing how things will turn out we have to plan for a number of contingencies."

Mr Blankfein added that he favoured a Brexit transition period of at least "a couple of years" once an exit deal has been agreed in 2019.

He said: "We are talking about the long-term stability of huge economies with hundreds of millions of people and livelihoods at stake and huge gross domestic product.

"But if there is no period of time to implement whatever changes are brought about in a negotiation, we may have to do things prematurely and we may have to do a range of things as a precaution and take steps."

To make matters worse, Brexit has also put London's position as the global centre for euro-clearing at risk, after the European Union confirmed it could force City clearing houses to relocate to the bloc.

The European Commission (EC) outlined fresh proposals on Thursday which threatened London's dominance over the multi-trillion pound euro-clearing market after Brexit.

Mr Blankfein said his hope is that "we will be able to conduct our business as close as we can to the way we conduct it today.

"That is, we could have German nationals marketing German securities to German investors from the UK. And be resident in the UK and accomplish that.

"I think it is in the best interests of the UK, the best interests of Germany, to have London - which has a lot of experience about regulating these markets - continue close to that model."