Can Y’all Street outflank Wall Street?

0:01NPR.

0:06A few months ago, I found myself in the middle of a construction site in Dallas. It was full of dust and wind and workers in hardhats going up and down in freight elevators. This is the new Dallas office for Goldman Sachs. Or it will be in 2028 when it's fully built and has thousands of employees working there. Goldman is spending more than half a billion dollars to build this 14-story campus right in the heart of Dallas. And Goldman is in good company. The New York Investment Bank is one of several financial companies that are all setting up shop or expanding in the Dallas area. This is what Texas is calling Y 'all Street.

0:46Get it? Like Wall Street, but with a Texas twang? Clever. And since everything's bigger in Texas, some of the people behind Y 'all Street are hoping that it can become even more powerful than the OG Wall Street. This financial rivalry is mostly about business growth and economic activity, but it's also a little about politics. I mean, what isn't these days? Tell me about it. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And back with me is friend of the show, Maria Aspin. Maria, great to see you again. Thank you. It's so great to be back. You recently spent some time in Texas talking to a bunch of Y 'all Street executives and other locals.

1:26I did. And that's today on the show. What exactly is happening on Y 'all Street? And can Texas really steal Wall Street's financial crown?

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2:52A few days after I visited Goldman's next Dallas home, I caught up with the man in charge. Awesome Khalil is a Goldman Sachs partner and head of its Dallas office. He's also a lifelong New Yorker who moved to Texas for Goldman 10 years ago. Now he's all in. This is the most welcoming city you'll find anywhere in the country, if not the world. People are happy to be here. They want you to be happy to be here. The schools are great. The culture is amazing. And the business climate is far surpassed, again, any expectation or any thoughts that I had when I came down here as an uninformed New Yorker 10 years ago.

3:28Does he work for Goldman or the Economic Development Board? And, you know, I heard the same thing from a lot of former New Yorkers in the financial industry who moved to Dallas. Interesting. But that business climate he's talking about is a big part of the appeal. And it means a few things. Goldman Sachs, like other big banks, competes for the business of the biggest companies and the wealthiest individuals. And Texas has plenty of both. In fact, it's now home to the most Fortune 500 companies in the nation, more than California, New York, or any other state. And we're talking more than just oil companies and American airlines.

4:05Texas is now home to all kinds of big names, like Tesla, Charles Schwab, and the pharma giant McKesson. There's also a population boom in Texas, which makes it easier for employers to hire. And as Austin points out, Goldman isn't the only bank to be seizing this opportunity. When I look out my window, I see our campus under construction. If I look up over here, I see Bank of America is building their tower. J.P. Morgan has a presence across the street from us here. I understand Morgan Stanley's looking for more space right around where we happen to be. Scotiabank is on the other side of our campus.

4:39So I like to think of like the beating heart of Yall Street is where those five or six banks are all situated. There's another big thing companies love about Texas. It's often just cheaper and easier to do business there. Texas has always been known for having lower taxes and lighter regulations than a lot of other states. And recently, the state has been passing laws that basically make Texas even more business-friendly, in part by making it harder for shareholders to sue the companies they invest in. This is all happening as some CEOs have become really unhappy with states like New York and California and even Delaware, where a lot of companies have their legal headquarters.

5:21The biggest example is Elon Musk, who moved both SpaceX and Tesla to Texas. Musk is a big critic of both California and Delaware. And he's close to Texas's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and, of course, to President Trump. Enter the politics. Back in 2020, Abbott told CNBC he was offering Musk a place for his businesses to thrive. And he knows he has a better ability to do that in Texas with the freedoms that we offer him, with the low cost that we offer him, than he does in other places like California. Abbott has spent years beating this drum. He's attacked companies that embrace policies around fighting climate change or embracing workplace diversity.

5:59And he frequently promotes Texas as a pro-business refuge from other states with more liberal leaders or policies. Now, some of those other states are giving Texas politicians even more chances to whip out those talking points. For example, California is now threatening to put a wealth tax on billionaires. And New York is now being run by Mayor Zoran Mandani, the Democratic socialist who many on Wall Street love to hate. When I talked to Dallas' mayor, Eric Johnson, a few months ago, he explicitly called out both California and New York. We very much are a pro-business city. We don't vilify corporations down here.

6:41We view them as partners and we view them as job creators that we want to support. So we're always trying to figure out ways to make it easier to do business down here. That includes paying businesses to come down there. For example, Dallas gave Goldman Sachs about$18 million worth of economic incentives to build its new office in the city. But Eric talks about this heated rivalry for businesses on a more epic scale. I really do believe that we represent the future of capitalism in this country. And we are a sanctuary city from socialism. A sanctuary city from socialism. That is some loaded language.

7:22The Mamdani fear is real. But it's also an example of how the political rhetoric around Y 'all Street is a useful marketing tool for Texas. Because however much the financial industry is growing in Dallas, it's still got a long way to go to replace New York. We're seeing that especially in the stock market. A lot of the buzz around Y 'all Street has been coming from a startup called the Texas Stock Exchange. It's backed by some pretty big Wall Street names, including Goldman Sachs. It wants to challenge the dominant U.S. stock exchanges, meaning the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. And it's even trying to pick up some business in London.

8:01But the Texas Stock Exchange only officially opened this month. And in general, it's got a really long way to go. Yeah, it's just really hard to compete in this industry. The Nasdaq launched more than half a century ago, and we haven't seen a major U.S. competitor break through since. Even some of the investors in the Texas stock exchange say they don't see Y 'all Street becoming a huge threat to Wall Street. They're more excited about Texas expanding on its own. At Goldman Sachs, Awesome says he doesn't think Dallas looks at this as a zero-sum game. When you think about this concept of Y 'all Street and moving more finance jobs to Dallas, I think it's just a natural evolution of the financial services industry.

8:42It's also worth pointing out that however much financial activity is happening in Dallas, New York isn't exactly becoming a ghost town. Goldman Sachs still has its headquarters near Wall Street. Or take the country's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase. It's also expanded in Texas, but it just opened a$3 billion headquarters in the middle of Manhattan. So Yall Street is probably going to be the underdog for a pretty long time. Maria, great to have you back with us. Thanks for bringing us this story. It was so great to be with you. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Jimmy Keely, was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.

9:21Caking Cannon is our editor, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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