As you might have seen in the papers, the Intercontinental Exchange, based in Atlanta, recently purchased the New York Stock Exchange.
Oh my god, to hear Mayor Daley fume and fret you’d have thought that the Cubs and White Sox together were about to move to Tennessee.
In other words, take the CME offer and your newly formed company gets the TIF money. Take ICE’s offer and you don’t.
Eventually, CME turned down the $15 million. That’s because they were threatening to move out of town if the state didn’t give them a tax break worth tens of millions of dollars. And you can’t very well threaten to move out of town if you have an obligation to keep 1,750 jobs in town.
I plowed through page after page of New York Times coverage but could find no reference to any New York politician opening up the public purse to somehow block the deal.
That’s when the mayor unexpectedly stops by a firehouse to tell firefighters that as much as he appreciates them, he has no choice but to cut their pensions.
