WSJ: Time for Wall Street to Work With Mamdani

Are you sure about that?

Are you sure about that?

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning on the aftermath of the Big Apple fight over socialism, where capital lost. Zohran Mamdani won easily last night, winning an outright majority of ballots cast by New York City voters, 50.6% as of this morning with 87% of precincts reporting. Andrew Cuomo got 41.7%, while Curtis Sliwa -- the only rational candidate still left on the ballot -- received 7.1% of the vote.

New York City has chosen socialism, and the WSJ suggests that capitalists will just have to suck it up. But is that their only option?

Wall Street heavyweights failed to stop New York City voters from electing a democratic socialist mayor. Now what?

There was an air of defeat on Tuesday evening in New York’s upper echelons as it became clear that Zohran Mamdani had won the mayor’s race. Some top figures in the city’s finance industry found the notion of a Mamdani administration unthinkable and had spent millions to elevate other candidates.

Now, they have to work with the new mayor—and hope that their worst fears about his impact on the city’s business climate won’t come true.

But do they? Do they have to work with Mamdani, and is hope their only strategy? They lay out what's coming, if Mamdani gets his way:

Mamdani, 34 years old, has risen swiftly from an outer-borough backbencher in the state Assembly to election as the city’s chief executive by harnessing the broad unrest many New Yorkers feel about being priced out. He has promised an additional 2% tax on millionaires and to raise taxes on businesses to pay for free buses, expanded child care and city-run grocery stores.

The city-run grocery stores policy has already been tried in various places. They inevitably collapse, a reminder of the lessons of socialism that should have been learned from the Soviet Union. Price controls lead to runs on merchandise and supply interruptions, which leads to empty shelves -- while private-sector grocery stores exit the market. Get ready for the Big Apple to go from bodegas to food deserts, and for Mamdani to follow the socialist playbook with increasingly authoritarian policies to cover up the inherent failures of socialism. 

F.A. Hayek astutely explains this cycle in The Road to Serfdom, a book NYC voters should have read before now. Or maybe they just should have checked out how well the government groceries worked out in Kansas City. Remember when Mayor Quinton Lucas fancied himself a greengrocer with $29 million of taxpayer money?

Wow. Kansas City Mayor @MayorLucasKC spent $29 million of tax money to open a City govt. public grocery store that has now gone bust.
When will the far left learn Socialism always fails? pic.twitter.com/HLmNMQzAZk

— Melissa Tate (@TheRightMelissa) August 14, 2025

Take a big whiff, New Yorkers, of the stale smell of your future for the next four years. 

That is, the New Yorkers who don't have options elsewhere. That brings us back to the WSJ's lament that capital will just have to learn to get along with socialists, but that's only a choice. Capital always has options, and capital can always leave and go where opportunities exist. A former deputy mayor warned the WSJ about this point:

“It’s about public safety and quality of life more broadly. Those go in the wrong direction, and any employer is going to have a hard time attracting and keeping good people,” said Ed Skyler, an executive at Citigroup who was a deputy mayor under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The people that Mamdani plans to soak for his socialist/utopian agenda have options, because capital markets have options. The financial sector and the stock exchanges moved their annexes out of Chicago this year to Dallas, Texas, where "Y'All Street" has now become fully operational. They made that change thanks to the increasingly socialist policies in Chicago under Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, the same disincentives that Mamdani plans to create in NYC.

Both the NYSE and NASDAQ have satellite exchanges on Y'All Street, and a new Texas Stock Exchange for small- and mid-cap startups opened earlier this year. Dallas already has the second-largest financial sector among American cities, trailing only the Big Apple. The truth that the WSJ misses is that the capital markets already have one foot outside of New York City, and it will not take much to move their operations -- or at least enough of them to matter -- to a much more welcoming tax and regulatory environment in Texas. At a certain point, the employers and the employees about whom Skyler warns will demand an escape from New York.

Speaking of which, perhaps Mamdani voters should cast their minds back to that classic film from 1981. When John Carpenter and Kurt Russell made magic in Escape from New York, it worked because of the decadence, chaos, and failure of the Big Apple that preceded it in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to quasi-socialist policies and bleeding-heart approaches to crime. Unhappy days will come again, and this time around, Wall Street has options -- and they are already exercising them.  The crazies are already living in the subways again ...

Editor’s Note: Zohran Mamdani is an avowed Democratic Socialist and has just become the next mayor of New York City.

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