Sasha,
All I know is what's in that NYT editorial: (http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/30mon1.html) I guess Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki will find ways tokeep the NYSE by getting city council and legislature to finance it.
The NYSE should have threatened to leave during the socialist reign of Democratic Governor Cuomo (ousted in '94) and Democratic Mayor Dinkins (ousted in '93). It would have been a great _Atlas Shrugged_ lesson: reminding everyone who produces the wealth. We have a federal "surplus" driven by bulging tax receipts from the bull market. Imagine the benefits to the global economy of a more spacious, more computerized, more efficient stock exchange.
800,000 people are still on the welfare rolls in NYC. (1.6 times the population of Boston.) Assuming each person costs $5,000 per year (and they surely cost more), that comes to $4 billion, over 4 times the price of the new NYSE center.
>Also, why is the huge manual trading floor still needed?
>I'd expect much less money would be needed to computerize the whole
>damn thing.
Perhaps NYSE should go the way of NASDAQ.
-Han Huang
hhuang@mit.edu
http://mit.edu/hhuang/www