When Banks Move Headquarters

If Barclays ends up losing ABN Amro to the consortium headed by RBS, one thing that CEO John Varley might be quite happy about will be the prospect of not having to move to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a pleasant city, to be sure – but it's hardly the center of the financial universe. London is.

London's only rival as a financial capital is New York. But just as Barclays is saying that it wants to move to Amsterdam, JP Morgan Chase is claiming that it might consider moving to Stamford. OK, the distance from London to Amsterdam – 221 miles – is bigger than the distance from New York to Stamford, which is just 32 miles. But at least Amsterdam is home to some big banks. There are big banks with presences in Stamford, but none with headquarters there.

I'm skeptical that JP Morgan is really serious about this whole Stamford thing – for one thing, I certainly wouldn't want to be the person charged with telling David Rockefeller the news. Really, it's just an attempt to squeeze tax breaks out of the city and state of New York, which is a bit cheap considering the amount of money that JP Morgan is making these days.

The real story here is that Chase wants the same kind of deal that Goldman Sachs got to build its new headquarters on West Street. But that wasn't the result of Goldman being underhand, it was the result of utter incompetence on the part of George Pataki, who vetoed Goldman's plans before changing his mind. That kind of thing tends only to happen once.