Given it is now a digital internet connected world, why the finacial industry has to cluster together at Wall Street or any other particular venue beats me.
Stock trades that are mere miliseconds apart can make or break an investment company. Physical proximity makes all the difference.
My oldest son lives near Dallas and works in the financial industry. His employer is based in NYC, but my son spends about a third of his time visiting clients all over the country, and the remainder talking to them on his cell phone, where he is always accessible. He convinced his employer not to worry about "where I get my mail." He lives about 40 miles north of Dallas in the Plano/McKinney area. His house is twice the size of the one he had in NJ, for exactly the same price.
NYC is as close to a current Babylon worldwide power centralized in one city..political (UN) and business/economic at least...and then religion of the world, secular humanism, has NYC as a hub...
I declare that divine providence..
And I would stay as far away as I could...
Because business is still a network of human beings looking each other in the eye and investing, not in the venture itself, but in the person proposing it.
Digital communications is never going to provide a substitute for showing up and allowing two people to look each other in the eye and have a no-BS conversation.
Program traders actually want their servers a physically close to wallstreet computers because a shorter wire is nanoseconds faster.
unfortunatly those servers are not in NYC, they are in New Jersey...