<p>Boston is home to many large mutual funds and pension fund advisors so it is a center of financial jobs.</p>
<p>Los Angeles is home to the same things, doesnt make it a financial center. Houston and Dalls have there fair share of large fund companies, but when factoring in the PE groups and hedge funds, i would put these cities first since they have more activity and more money flowing.</p>
<p>I would like to venture that Greenwich, CT is the United States 2nd financial capital after New York.</p>
<p>i concur (10 chars).</p>
<p>chicago is undisputed as the second runner up in America and NYC isnt even the financial capital of the world, that title would have to be given to London if you look at the amount of money that flows in and out</p>
<p>southpasadena we are talking about the united states, and the last time i checked london in no way factors into this thread.</p>
<p>hmmmm...but Chicago is. How weird is that. I just felt like adding that in while i was typing away. If you think 150 billion spread about 100+ hedge funds is greater than what happens in chicago, then please, go right ahead.</p>
<p>You guys underrank boston too much. Some of the greatest companies are developed by think-tanks that are started by former harvard and MIT grads. One current example is Facebook, which is increasing in value each day and is almost a billion dollar idea. What I mean to say is that Boston is known for great start-ups and in my opinion that makes up more of American business than we think. That is why I am torn between whether I want to live in NYC or Boston after college.</p>
<p>Facebook, although started by a Harvard grad, is based in Palo Alto, CA.</p>
<p>Yeah, it is now, but he started it out of his dorm and like I said in my post, once these start-ups reach a certain level they move, as with facebook.</p>
<p>So how does Facebook moving out of Boston help Boston become a top financial city? I am truly lost.</p>
<p>You guys missed the point of my post. There are so many start-ups in Boston, that essentially start there and move to bigger cities. So, when your talking about financial cities. Boston is usually one of teh first stops because it is a city with tons of bright young college students looking for jobs and start-ups love young innovative people so lets say if a lot of innovative companies start out in Boston, that would make it a financial starting point rather than a financial city per say. Even though you have great companies like fidelity and such there.</p>
<p>Boston is still pretty low on the American financial food chain, at least in my opinion. I am a former resident of Boston, so I have some idea of what goes on there also.</p>
<p>I think someone is missing the fact that when it comes to economic activity overall in this country, the two top areas are Manhattan and the Silicon Valley. Last time I checked there were over 10,000 firms in the Valley, with over 20 of them doing $5 billion plus in sales per year. Now I agree that is not the same as 150 billion pounds in investment funds, which London has, or 300 billion in dollars in funds, which Boston does easily, but if we are talking about generating wealth, not just investing in other's ideas, I would think that San Francisco/San Jose ranks highly. </p>
<p>Do the names Cisco, Sun, Seagate, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Applied Materials, Oracle, Symantec, Adobe, AMD, Sanmina-SCI, Google, Yahoo, E-Bay, Electronic Arts (EA Sports), Mercury Interactive, West Marine, Granite Construction, National Semiconductor, Agilent or Knight-Rider ring a bell? All are located in the Silicon Valley--and almost all of them started there.</p>
<p>This doesn't even include all the firms in the southern part of the state--including all the film companies and aerospace sub-contractors in LA, and the biotechnology firms in San Diego.</p>
<p>There is a reason that California has a larger economy than all but six other countries all by itself--and why it has a larger economy than any other state (including New York) by a large margin.</p>
<p>economic activity is one thing, but in flows/out flows for financial activity and number of employees per sector, in this case finance is what i believe was being discussed. </p>
<p>either way, go California, the best state to live in if it only had more snow (without having to go to the mountains)</p>