> I don't think that a very good indicator. There is a difference between the tech industry and financial services. Financial services depend on markets that have a well known and established opening and closing time. In the US the markets are very much tied to 9:30AM to 4:00PM in the Eastern time zone.

That hasn't really been the case for quite some time. A majority of option and equity trading now happens directly rather than on open exchanges and is thus immune to "market hours". Forex is 24 hour. And London is still the finance powerhouse despite not being in the largest economy (and not being in the Euro, but manages the vast majority of Euro bond trading) and in fact being in a country the rest of whose economy is a basket case.

But physical propinquity still matters, it seems, for the human intangibles.

>"That hasn't really been the case for quite some time. A majority of option and equity trading now happens directly rather than on open exchanges and is thus immune to "market hours"

Its not just the actual exchanges like the NYSE or NASDAQ but all of the other participants - the investment banks, the hedge funds, the ratings agencies, the analysts, the financial press. Following the sun, the day breaks first on the East Coast in the U.S. So yes while it could move to Boston, Mass, Charlotte, N.C. or back to Philadelphia where incidentally it was before Wall Street its probably limited to the boundaries of the Eastern Time Zone in U.S.

That's pretty much the definition of a "hub". Wall St doesn't need to relocate. Global markets have adapted to operate on EST. Not the other way around.

I'm not really understanding your argument I guess. My point was that hub of finance for the U.S is largely dependent on co-locating where the sun rises first in the U.S. and Silicon Valley has no such analog. So while the hub of finance could move somewhere else on the East Coast its very much limited to the 17 states in EST and then further limited by states with cities and infrastructure that can support it all.

The finance hub has actually moved a bit. Tt was in Philadelphia before NYC and "Wall Street" moved away from the area around the actual Wall Street after the Sept 11th attacks. Wall Street is largely in midtown Manhattan now and New Jersey. But still on the East Coast.

I don't think a time difference of a couple hours would be that insurmountable, but that doesn't explain why they wouldn't move to, say, Atlanta or Miami.