Is New York City’s Finance Industry Falling Apart?

The generous social benefits that people in New York City are able to access are made possible, in large part, by the taxes imposed on the financial services industry and those who built and work in it. It’s therefore ironic that a mayoral election in which one of the candidates promised a massive expansion of various benefits took place as the world of finance was showing signs of leaving New York City.
(As we go to press, the New York City mayoral election is still ongoing. A win by Zohran Mamdani may accelerate the issues discussed here.)
A number of recent articles and news reports have examined the implosion of finance in NYC, with statistics demonstrating the years-long decline.
One is simply the percentage of workers in the city who are in the finance industry. Aside from a small bump up in 2020, it has been slowly decreasing for decades. In 1990, 11.5% of the city’s workers worked in finance or insurance. By August of this year, that percentage had dropped to 7.7%, with the healthcare and social assistance industries rocketing to more than 22% of the city’s workers.
It’s not that those jobs have entirely disappeared. They’ve just moved elsewhere. In the past five years, 233,000 finance jobs have been created in the US. New York got just 19,000 of those. Where did most of the other jobs go? Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia all saw greater growth of employment opportunities in the financial sector than New York.
Another way of looking at it: The financial sector has grown by just 4% in New York City since 2019, while in Austin, it grew by 27%; in Charlotte, it rose by 21%; and in Dallas, it increased by 11%.
The large finance companies have themselves encouraged these shifts. Goldman Sachs has promoted Dallas and Salt Lake City as good places for its managers to move to. Citigroup announced this year that it was expanding its operations in North Carolina. And these kinds of companies have recentered their operations. Morgan Stanley is the largest employer in Alpharetta, Georgia (only 25 miles from Atlanta, it’s considered part of the metro area). JPMorgan Stanley has more employees in Texas than in New York.