Your Evening Briefing: Wall Street Watches $1 Trillion Go South

The relocation of a small portion of the American financial industry from New York and California to the US South has been measured anecdotally, often one office at a time, over these past few years. Elliott Management decamped for West Palm Beach. AllianceBernstein to Nashville. Charles Schwab landed in suburban Dallas. But now, perhaps for the first time, there are hard numbers quantifying the scope of this nascent exodus. Both New York and California have in the past three years lost firms that managed close to $1 trillion of assets, Bloomberg calculated. The departures from the Northeast and West Coast have meant the loss of thousands of high-paying jobs, in turn straining city and state finances by sapping tax revenue. Commercial property markets also have lost valuable tenants just as they’ve been struggling with the new realities of hybrid work. Sure, the New York City area remains the most powerful center for asset management. But in the South, the new arrivals are fueling a boom.

Goldman Sachs is exploring a sale of an investment-advisory business it bought four years ago, undoing yet another signature deal under Chief Executive Officer David Solomon’s ill-fated push to manage money for a broader set of customers.