It's not my claim. Forbes Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Washington Post That last bit is because the nation's largest power company is headquartered in Charlotte....started there, didn't move there.
Let's try this from another angle. There's a city in California (Baker) that claims to have the world's tallest thermometer. Note the link, which is to wiki, states that this is factually correct, and that the thermometer is 137 feet, representing the hottest temperature ever recorded in the United States. So what? Does it matter at all unless you think having the tallest thermometer matters? We all get this one, we all know that it doesn't matter. Believe it or not, the value of deposits for a bank headquartered in a location likewise doesn't matter. It doesn't really tell us anything about what's going on there, any more than a silly monument tells us anything about Baker, or the flagged freighters explain whether Liberia is a maritime center. It just isn't a meaningful measure. The reason I mentioned reinsurance is that it's something that is arcane but matters a great deal. It's also something that is growing quickly in Charlotte. I take that as a much stronger indicator that Charlotte is important in the world of finance than any statement about banking assets. So yes, by a few different measures, Charlotte is a growing and important player in the world of finance. But it is far from being a Boston or Dubai. So when the civic boosters beat their chest and proudly proclaim Bank of America, to me it just looks a bit silly.
I was being nice when I said I didn't know the history. I really meant that I didn't care, that it was irrelevant. People are dismissing the 'by assets' metric, b/c like 'by ships flagged' metric, it tells you very little. For something to be a 'center' there has to be a nationally significant concentration of economic activity in that sector occurring there. While an imperfect measure of that, the number of people involved in the economic activity is much more accurate than the location of the account the money gets parked in overnight. Employment by Sector, Financial Services: Boston: 145k http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ma_boston_nd.htm Seattle: 93k http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.wa_seattle_msa.htm Atlanta: 158k http://www.bls.gov/ro4/cesatl.pdf Chicago: 260k http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.il_chicago_md.htm Los Angeles: 217k http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ca_losangeles_md.htm New York: 682k http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ny.htm Charlotte: 72k http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.nc_charlotte_msa.htm
Basically, in the 1960's people who owned old Victorians and the old small single family homes in SF (and the bay area in general) got pissed off because developers, responding to market demand for more units, kept building high rises which obstructed their views of the water and thus lowered the value of their property. To make these NIMBYs happy the city then passed strict high limit restrictions and "view corridor" laws which effectively have killed high rise construction in the city except for special areas exempted from the rules. This is both stupid and sad because SF already has the transit infrastructure in place and it is a compact city with no where left to grow so the area would be ideal for high density redevelopment especially since it is so in demand and prices are among the highest in the nation often rivaling Manhattan. http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Height_Limit_Revolt_Saves_Waterfront_Vistas http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox...ng_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/03/local/la-me-sf-waterfront-20131104
I've been accused of this in the past; usually by a girlfriend who will shortly be announcing she no longer wants to be my girlfriend.
The fact that Dinner claimed BofA moved from California to NC as a tax dodge makes it relevant. If the number of people is the more accurate metric of what a "financial center" is, then why are you the only one using it as such? I've posted link after link after link of Charlotte being called the number 2 banking center in the US. I would say the majority of people that are dismissing it are right here in this thread. Hell, let's try googling 2nd largest banking center in the united states and see what we get. My claim indeed.
Naw, the south has many good things which it can be given credit for (food being one of them) but when it comes to banking Georgia is by far the actual banking capital of the south. Just look at how banks from Georgia out number all the rest combined except for Texas. How can CA be losing people when its population keeps going up? It hasn't lost anything in net terms and that's what you have to worry about, net terms. Fox and Co know this but that doesn't fit their narrative so they ignore it and hope their views aren't bright enough to know that as well. If I was to move to the East Coast I'd actually give NC a close look because I've heard many good things about it and if I sometimes seem angry about it just remember it is due to my past experiences living in Fayetteville. That's enough to scare anyone but I know the rest of the state is better.
You could also look at it in terms of supply and demand. The reason prices are so high is because there is sky high demand among people with money combined with a lack of new places to build. There are a lot of people who can't afford the sky high prices so they would like to stay but got priced out. I.E. they can't afford to live in such a high demand place so they're opting to move to a less in demand place where prices are lower and they can actually afford a place with a white picket fence.
Shoes, I just want to clear something up. Nobody is denying the factual claim regarding the 2nd highest value of deposits. You don't need to keep finding sources for this. It's acknowledged and accepted as hard data. The argument some of us are making is that this metric does not in itself indicate that Charlotte is "second larges banking center in the United States." There are other metrics that arguably state otherwise.
Oh, I get that. As someone said up thread, housing wouldn't be that expensive there if people weren't willing to pay for it.
I get that as well, but that is the metric that the people at Wikipedia, Forbes, and the Washington Post apparently use...and that's where I stopped looking. If the metric that they are using is a bad one, then why are they using it? You'd think the folks at Forbes know what they're doing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America Bank of America did start in California. It did merge by Nationsbank and BankAmerica and Nationsbank was based out of Charlotte so I was wrong about that. That said, the name "Bank of America" was used many, many decades before that and was based out of California. I can't blame them for wanting to use that name for the merged entity as it really is a cherry name for doing Business in the US. The time line is something like this according to wiki: 1904: Bank of Italy founded in San Francisco 1922: It becomes the Bank of America and Italy 1927: It becomes Bank of America 1956: BankAmerica Corp founded as a holding company holding only Bank of America. Bank of America continues to be the banks brand name which customers see though it still is only operating in California. 1956-1994: BoA expands over much of the western US 1994 Bank of America merges with some bank in Chicago making it cover all of the US but shareholders of the merged bank now trade stock as BankAmerica. 1998: Merges with NationsBank and new combined corp is called Bank of America which was the brand name continually used since 1927. Merged company based out of Charlotte.
Forbes is an extremely politically motivated magazine because its owner, Steve Forbes, is a wanna be politician who has made multiple failed runs for the Republican nomination. It was actually founded by his grandfather in 1917 and Steve's public speeches and op-eds always struck me as someone who is driven by ideology more than facts. He also loves, loves, loves to run partisan political talking point memes even when there is no real evidence. For instance, in 2009 and 2010 Forbes kept claiming "rich people are fleeing California because of high taxes!" when in fact the quoted metric of there being fewer people filing tax returns as millionaires in the state had everything to do with the economy taking a crap and so people no longer getting those big bonuses, commissions, and development jobs. Net migration numbers showed those people were still working and hadn't moved they just didn't get their giant bonuses when the company was no longer making the profits it did during the bubble years.
Oh God, please don't judge NC by Fayetteville. I went to school for a time in Laurinburg, and Fayetteville was the closest "big" city. It sucks ass.
It depends on how the deal was structured and I have no idea if it was really one entity buying another or if it was a more complex deal. It very well might have been an outright purchase though I just used the word merge as that was the word wiki used.
If you think Fayetteville was bad to visit, try living there for three years. Fucking horrible. Talk about no there there, just fucking suburbia and... nothing to every horizon. My wife got seriously depressed. I was looking forward to Afghanistan. And when I left she came to Seattle and slept on a fold out couch for eight months just to get out of that shithole.
Oh, it's not just Fayetteville. It's the NC sand hills. Fayetteville is actually the bright spot there.
Asheville is my favorite place in NC. I'd have much rather moved there, but I got the job in Charlotte. It's like Austin Texas in the Appalachians.
This is one of those times when you should have just kept your ass shut, b/c you don't have a damn clue. There is a reason that shithole is nicknamed Fayettenam. There is a damn holiday called Fugitive Surrender Day. Billboards, radio ads, the works... 'Stop Running and Start Living'. There are special teams of judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys that day just standing bye. Come on in and get it over with. When I was leaving the City Council was debating legalizing the use of crossbows within city limits to deal with the packs of wild dogs terrorizing the place. SHITHOLE. No one, not one damn person actually wants to live in that wasteland, that's while it's called 'doing time' there. When I was at Lewis I thought it crazy that our NBC NCO went AWOL instead of PCSing to Bragg, but after having lived in Fayetteville I can see it.
I can remember one time being at the Chili's in Fayetteville (there were about 15 of us and the place was close by) and one of the guys kept hitting on the (rather cute) waitress until finally at the end of the meal my co-worker said "Baby, what will it take to get you to marry me?" and the waitress simply said "Promise to take me away from this shit hole". She said instantly and with a total dead pan face.
There are two types of women in Fayetteville, those who were born there and those who were left there.
I was only up at Fort Lewis for PLDC (and that was waaaayyyy back when) but it struck me as a vastly superior place to be posted compared to Bragg. Then again I like the PNW and go up their fairly regularly.
There is a reason Lewis is the most requested CONUS duty station (Schofield Barracks is obviously most requested overall).
