So which would be worse,’ I asked Bill. ‘The New York Stock Exchange leaving Wall Street or the Yankees leaving the Bronx?’ My paper had run stories on both that morning and it seemed reasonable to ask Bill since he was both a broker and a baseball fan.
‘What Steinbrenner does with the Yankees, who can say,’ he replied. ‘But the exchange will stay downtown, even if it moves from Broad Street and Wall.’ I wondered if the growing tendency to refer to the marble temple to capitalism by its location or address rather than as ‘The Stock Exchange’ was a sign that its fate was already sealed.
‘It’s a great building,’ said Bill. I waited for the ‘but’. ‘But it’s too small, too dilapidated and it can’t cope with the needs of modern technology.’
‘And there are some terrific tax breaks and grants to be got through relocating,’ I added, thinking of the $90 mn offer the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange had extracted from the city last spring by threatening to move. ‘I suppose that has to be a factor when you’re facing competition and trying to keep costs down. The exchange has been talking to the mayor’s office about the problem.’
I wondered if there wasn’t something odd in an institution which was wedded to transparent dealing and equal treatment seeking to distort the market by leaning on the city to provide what amounted to backhanders.
‘The exchange isn’t holding the city to ransom,’ Bill countered. ‘We’re not threatening to move to Jersey unless we get what we want.’ This was a reference to the Yankees’ owner’s threat to cross the Hudson if he didn’t get support for a new stadium in Manhattan. ‘But nothing is decided yet. The exchange could stay put or it could move to a new facility. But whatever it does, it will stay within the financial district’.
I noted the use of the word ‘facility’. It seemed to dismiss any possibility of a sentimental attachment to George Post’s 93 year old landmark building. Bill certainly didn’t regard Yankee Stadium as a facility. He was vehemently opposed to the team moving from what he described as the most famous arena in the land.
And to speak of the exchange being committed to staying downtown had a faint whiff of hypocrisy about it, coming from Bill whose firm had joined PaineWebber, Morgan Stanley and others in the flight to midtown a few years ago.
The exchange seemed to be playing its hand well. At a time when the office vacancy rate downtown was double that of midtown, it had leaked its musings about a possible move while firmly professing that it was in the early stages of examining its needs. Somehow, without any official comment, the prospect of moving to the empty building on Water Street, rejected by the Mercantile Exchange in 1994, became common currency. Letting rumour spread while confirming nothing seemed to have been enough to generate urgent discussions between mayor Giuliani and exchange chairman Grasso.
‘I don’t know why some people are so concerned with a building which has outlived its purpose,’ said Bill. ‘Because it’s a landmark,’ I said. ‘It’s a symbol. Like St Patrick’s Cathedral and Yankee Stadium.’
‘Or like the Chrysler building or the Pan-Am building,’ Bill rejoined. ‘We’re talking business here. The exchange was 111 years old when it moved to the present building. I’m sure there were protests then about it deserting its roots.’
‘But what it did then was commission a building which was a symbol of the virtues the exchange proclaimed. Now it’s thinking about moving to a nondescript empty office block. The move to 18 Wall Street was about progress; won’t moving to Water Street look like a retreat?’
‘It could be a new building,’ said Bill, referring to Donald Trump’s offer to provide a new home for the exchange in the complex he wanted to build at South Street Seaport. ‘And anyway, the exchange isn’t in retreat. Volumes, listings and memberships are all up. The present building is just too small to cope with growth and face down the electronic interloper.’
Like a Coca Cola executive, NYSE aficionados never seem to mention the name of the competitor – although the growth of Nasdaq was probably the key factor in this debate.
In the discussions about the Yankees’ proposed move, it was pointed out that the two greatest growth areas in US construction are sports stadiums and prisons – both of which required people to be physically present. With securities trading migrating to cyberspace, I wondered if it would be too cynical to suggest that the NYSE was really after a nice fat check from the city for staying put while it contemplated its future.
