Amazon scraps its plans for New York headquarters

HSBC forex trading costs cut sharply by blockchain

More than a year of work to bring Amazon.com Inc's headquarters and tens of thousands of jobs to New York City ended with a couple of phone calls.

Jay Carney, the company's top policy executive, told New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that the world's biggest online retailer would not go ahead with plans to invest $2.5 billion to build a second head office in the New York City borough of Queens.

Carney, a former press secretary for President Barack Obama, told New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio the same shortly after. Abruptly scuttling its Big Apple plans blindsided Amazon's allies and opponents alike. The company said the decision came together only in the last 48 hours, made by its senior leadership team and Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, chief executive and the richest person in the world.

Yet by some measures the decision was months in the making, as community opposition signaled to the company that it was not entirely welcome.

Seattle-based Amazon captivated elected officials across North America in September 2017 when it announced it would create more than 50,000 jobs in a second headquarters dubbed HQ2. Cities and states vied desperately for the economic stimulus, with New Jersey offering $7 billion in potential credits and the mayor of an Atlanta suburb promising to make Bezos mayor for life of a new city called "Amazon."

A backlash began in earnest when Amazon announced two winners to split the offices last November: Arlington, Virginia, and New York's Long Island City neighborhood, with New York offering incentives worth $1.53 billion to Amazon. The company could apply for $900 million more, too. New York State Senator Michael Gianaris and City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer said that day that it was "unfathomable that we would sign a $3 billion check" to one of the world's most valuable companies considering the city's crumbling subways and overcrowded schools.

City Council meetings in December and January showed Amazon executives who showed up the stern opposition they could expect from some elected officials and labor organizers.

Protesters interrupted the meetings. A television report showed people unfurling signs saying, "Amazon delivers lies," and "Amazon fuels ICE deportations" - a reference to the company's cooperation with the U.S. Department in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Amazon felt that a small number of local and state officials had no desire to collaborate on a path forward, the company later said, despite what it said was strong popular support for its project.

Tension ratcheted up earlier this month, when Gianaris was nominated to a state panel set to vote in 2020 on whether to approve the financial terms for Amazon.

Days later, Amazon executives

LONDON: HSBC has reduced the cost of settling foreign exchange trades by a quarter through its blockchain-based system, an executive overseeing the project told Reuters, offering a glimpse of the savings the technology could offer banks. The bank processes between 3,500 and 5,000 trades a day on its "FX Everywhere" system, settling trades worth $350 billion, Mark Williamson, chief operating officer of FX cash trading and risk management. The HSBC platform is a rare example of blockchain technology being put to practical use by a major bank. Last month the London-based lender said it had processed FX trades worth $250 billion on the platform since February last year. The fresh details of the scale of the HSBC project suggest that the potential of blockchain to make significant cost savings in the financial services industry - long touted by its proponents of the technology - is being realized. "We going at a pace now," Williamson said. "We're able to demonstrate that this is not a one-off proof of concept or just one or two trades."

Supporters say blockchain - a shared database that can securely process and settle transactions without the need for third-party checks - could transform industries from finance to real estate by obviating cumbersome and inefficient processes.

weighed the pros and cons of whether to follow through with its New York headquarters, two people briefed on talks inside the company said. Concerned that Amazon could be in limbo for more than a year ahead of the state panel's vote, the growing consensus within the company was that it did not make sense to move ahead in the face of persistent opposition with a headquarters in New York City, where it

already has 5,000 employees.

Amazon had no binding legal contracts to acquire or lease the land for the project. It could exit with relatively little pain, the people said.

Company officials also concluded Amazon could shift the jobs that would have been created in New York to other corporate centers it has across the United States, from the San Francisco Bay Area to

Boston. Reopening talks with former HQ2 contestants did not make sense, the people said. Gianaris blamed Amazon for the reversal.

"Amazon never showed willingness to look seriously at the concerns that were raised," he said.

Still, up to the moment of the announcement, there were signs that the parties could work together.