With Wall Street jobs fleeing, New York is nearing the point of no return

New York is losing population, losing jobs and losing ground to the rest of the country — and its leaders just don’t seem to care.Start with last week’s news that banking giant JPMorgan Chase now employs more workers in Texas than in New York City; indeed the Lone Star State now has more bank employees than Gotham, period.Partnership for New York City chief Kathy Wylde is badly understating things when she calls this news “scary.”Plenty of other finance jobs have flown to Florida, North Carolina and other states; the day grows ever closer when the Big Apple, once the unrivaled financial services capital of America and the world, will become a finance backwater.The long trend predates COVID and even 9/11; ever since the early 1960s, the city and state have been piling on new taxes, among a host of other sins of omission and commission that make New York City ever-less affordable and livable.Even the gains of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years only slowed Gotham’s loss of ground relative to other parts of the nation.

And now the decline is starting to accelerate again: The city’s financial-services sector shrank by 8,400 jobs from January through August of this year, after adding 6,400 in the same time period in 2024.Despite that, the industry is by far the most crucial single part of the entire tri-state economy; easily the top source of tax revenue for both the city and state.Indeed, local government is more dependent on Wall Street than ever — because other industries have already fled more completely.Consider: 128 Fortune 500 firms had their headquarters in New York in 1965; today it’s down to about 50 — Texas beats us with 54, and even Florida has 22.Yet the state government is ever-more hostile to business of all kinds, and the city’s on the verge of making a socialist its next mayor.Two years back, Texas Gov.

Greg Abbott rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to promote an index that tracks the stocks of Texas companies; visi...