New York loses $1 trillion in Wall Street business as firms flee the city: report

nypost.com ^ | August 21, 2023 | Shannon Thaler

[lowbridge]

A giant, sucking sound is coming out of Wall Street — and it’s siphoning staggering sums of money out of the Big Apple while handing business to Florida and other states farther south.

Nearly 160 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters out of New York since the end of 2019, taking nearly $1 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a “T” — in assets under management with them, according to data from 17,000 companies compiled by Bloomberg.

Looking to dodge rampant crime, stiff taxes and an increasingly exorbitant cost of living, 158 fed-up financial firms representing a whopping $993 billion in assets have packed up and left the Big Apple, taking thousands of high-paid employees with them, the data shows.

Icahn Capital Management — headed by billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn — is among the most prominent firms to decamp to the Sunshine State. In August 2020, the firm ditched his posh Manhattan digs atop Fifth Avenue’s General Motors Building in favor of a 14-story office complex in a Miami suburb.

Icahn’s firm, which manages $22.2 billion in assets, now conducts business less than a mile away from his mansion in Indian Creek Village.

Meanwhile, hedge-fund tycoon Paul Singer’s Elliott Management — which commandeers a total of $59.2 billion after shaking up investment targets including AT&T, Twitter and the government of Argentina — moved its headquarters from Midtown Manhattan to West Palm Beach, Fla., in October 2020.

One year later, closely watched tech-stock guru Cathie Wood — famous for her bold, windfall bet on Elon Musk’s car maker Tesla –moved her firm ARK Investment Management — and its $24.7 billion worth of assets — to St. Petersburg, Fla.

[Albion Wilde]

Well, outdated to a degree; but only you would notice that at first. It’s excellent in the overall.

[Mouton]

Yup!

[powerset]

“With the internet, you can locate your firm anywhere.”

Not quite anywhere. A dozen years ago, I worked for a small company that built hardware and software for stock trading companies (e.g., Goldman Sachs). Our claim to fame was low-latency streaming of stock quotes while guaranteeing preserving their order. The distances involved were relatively short, such as the NYSE floor to New Jersey.

Getting the quotes and sending the bids a few milliseconds sooner than competitors could make a real difference in profits. It was like on-line action games, but for lots of money.

Of course Internet speeds have much improved since then, but so have computer (and thus decision) speeds, so distance still matters somewhat.