Dallas Challenges New York as New Financial Power Hub

Welcome to Y’all Street: bullish Dallas aims to steal New York’s financial crown

Texas city believes loose rules and low taxes will make the US’s biggest banks come…

the Guardian

By Kalyeena Makortoff

As the warm sun rises over the Dallas skyline, SUVs and pickup trucks whiz past an unassuming construction site that is helping cement the city’s Texas-sized financial ambitions.

Nestled between towers claimed by Bank of America and JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs has cordoned off 800,000 sq ft for a new Dallas campus able to host more than 5,000 staff. But the $700m (£530m) project is more than a regional expansion plan by one of America’s largest banks. It is another win for the lobbyists behind Dallas’s “Y’all Street” – the Texan city’s aggressive push to steal New York’s financial crown.

The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, once a fly-in, fly-out stopover for bankers, has seen its financial sector workforce boom over the past decade, surging 40% to 386,000 staff. Banks and investment houses – already keen to sidle up to Texas’s fossil-fuel industry and growing tech and AI sectors – have been lured by multimillion-dollar subsidies and new fast-track business courts, as well as Texas’s complete lack of corporation and income tax.

In the past 12 months alone, a 10-year property tax break and $2.7m worth of grants helped convinced the Canadian lender Scotiabank to relocate from North Carolina, bringing 1,000 jobs to the state. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq and the NYSE, keen to score potential listings, both launched branches of their stock exchanges in Dallas.

That followed news of a homegrown Texas stock exchange (TXSE), launching later this year, that has tried to undercut its rivals with looser listing rules likely to appeal to right-leaning executives. That includes an explicit absence of diversity requirements, once used by Nasdaq to bring more women and minorities into American boardrooms. Now, the more liberal Big Apple is in TXSE’s crosshairs, with a recently launched TV ad showing a Texas longhorn shattering Wall Street’s famous bull statue. “Welcome to the real bull market,” the TXSE declares…