They did that. Now they're discovering -- the hard way -- that they're actually defunding themselves.
According to the New York Post:
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.
Lefties might argue that it's not city money that's fleeing, it's "only" rich men's assets, but that's how idiots think.
The Post highlights some very concrete consequences for New York City in the wake of what this is, which is capital flight:
The mass migration threatens a crippling economic blow: Last year, Wall Street accounted for 16% of all the economic activity in the city and 7.3% of economic activity statewide. The latter figure is the highest in the nation by far, towering above the national average of just 1.7%, according to an October report by New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
Likewise, the exodus has grave tax implications for the city and state. Last year, financial firms paid $5.4 billion in New York taxes and accounted for nearly a quarter of all personal income tax collections, according to the report.
Tax revenue from the industry this year is headed for a “significant decline,” the report warned. It also noted that New York’s share of financial industry jobs was 17.6% in 2022 — down by nearly half from a third in 1990 — and noted that “jobs have shifted to lower-cost regions.”
So in other words, it's not just people fleeing New York, which is happening to the six-figue extent that they're losing congressional seats.
It's major investors, big financial companies, the thing that makes New York New York, the way tobacco once made Cuba Cuba (which of course is largely gone, now that socialism has taken hold). Wall Street is becoming Picket Fence Street.
Yet the businesses are fleeing for the same reasons that the people are fleeing: Bad government.
After all, the picture is largely the same: Run one of the world's most expensive cities. Tax them up the wazoo. Demonize corporations. Embrace COVID lockdowns. Defund the cops, or else incentivize them to retire at their desks. Let the homeless and drug-addicted roam freely. Let the organized theft rings shut down the retailers and restaurants. Let every car be subject to smash-and-grab robberies. Let vital city services, such as the subway, become dangerous no-go zones. Lose an analyst or two every so often to random violent crime. Ensure that public schools are not worth going to.
And most important, mock and laugh at those who do the logical thing, which is move someplace else where the costs are lower, the taxes are lower, the bums know they can't camp out in front of someone's headquarters, and the criminals know that they're headed to jail every time they loot a business. That was what New York's Gov. Kathy Hochul did when she spewed this to the state's 5.4 million Republicans:
“Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK?” she said. “You are not New Yorkers.”
Yes, she's getting what she wanted by seeing the back of such people -- and they are taking the money with them. No more lavish government spending. No more hiring of bureaucats, or funding of NGOs. No more greenie global warming "transitions." And eventually, no more tops of the lists regarding New York's place in global finance. Texas seems to be taking that crown.
What a sorry situation this is, given how foolish these people are about their own access to walking around money. It's like they plan about as much as Castro in Cuba did, the man whose socialism cost Cuba its tobacco industry crown. Worse still, wait till they see what their taxes collected are once property values go down amidst the empty skyscraprs.
As in the case of Bud Light, these big financial institutions were New York's customers and New York made it abundantly clear that they hated their customers.
This isn't solely a New York problem by the way.
San Francisco has seen similar flight, coming on the heels of a California pol's yelling of "F*** Elon Musk," for so much as threatening to pull his Tesla operations out of the Bay Area based on its lockdowns, instead of allow his company to function. After that kind of "class," Texas got the company operations ... and its revenues.
The after effect is this, which New York is sure to see, too:
The Chase Center. The Westin St. Francis Hotel. The Transamerica Pyramid.
These properties are among the most iconic in San Francisco, but what they also have in common is their owners are applying for dramatic cuts in their assessed values in a worrying sign for the city’s fiscal health.
At Chase Center, property owners are attempting to cut the city’s assessed $1.48 billion value for the stadium by some 58% to $635 million.
The owner of the Transamerica Pyramid, New York developer Shvo, which purchased the building in 2020, is seeking a 53% reduction in its assessed value from $485.5 million to $227 million.
The Westin St. Francis Hotel owners are applying for a more than 90% decrease in its assessed value of $787 million all the way down to $76 million.
They basically defunded these companies with their policies, and now the companies are lining up to ask to pay less revenue, based on the falling values of their properties. That's the ones who haven't fled.
In third world countries, when this sort of flight happens, dictatorships and shambly democratic leaders do their best to call their expatriates back, appealing to patriotism, lower tax rates, tax carveouts and anything that will do the trick. They know they can't live without finance capital.
But New York seems to be oblivous to this, not calling back its citizens, and certainly not trying to bring back the companies. Doing those things would require a change of their policies, their monster tax rates and all the things that make companies and people flee. That's a bridge too far for them, so like Hugo Chavez before them, they swear after the leavers leave -- and end up with less.
It's nice to say that somehow these problems solve themselves, but to see great cities go the way of Detroit in the 1970s is sad stuff. These blue city rulers are defunding themselves through their own policies and haven't a clue as to what will hit them.
Source: American Thinker.
