…with brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• Bloomberg has a story about how Goldman Sachs seems to have made out like a bandit with Amazon’s announcement that half its HQ2 installation will take place in New York’s Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan in the borough of Queens.
Not specifically because it had anything to do with the choice, but because “on the very same day the online retailer concluded its long, highly publicized search for a second headquarters … the bank quietly finalized a deal to provide $83 million for a massive new apartment complex less than a mile away, in Hunter’s Point South.”
The irony - considering that Amazon has been a simmering war with President Donald Trump - is that Goldman Sach’s move was prompted by “generous new tax breaks meant to entice investors to plow money into low-income areas across America designated as ‘opportunity zones.’ Institutions and wealthy investors that build in those areas can defer taxes on past capital gains, and avoid them on the future profits from their projects. Much of Long Island City sits in such a zone.”
“The timing was an ‘absolute coincidence,’ says Margaret Anadu, the head of Goldman Sachs’s Urban Investment Group, which did the deal. ‘I didn’t think New York was in the running, much less Long Island City’.”
Sure. It was a coincidence. Right. I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.
• Bloomberg has a story about how Goldman Sachs seems to have made out like a bandit with Amazon’s announcement that half its HQ2 installation will take place in New York’s Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan in the borough of Queens.
Not specifically because it had anything to do with the choice, but because “on the very same day the online retailer concluded its long, highly publicized search for a second headquarters … the bank quietly finalized a deal to provide $83 million for a massive new apartment complex less than a mile away, in Hunter’s Point South.”
The irony - considering that Amazon has been a simmering war with President Donald Trump - is that Goldman Sach’s move was prompted by “generous new tax breaks meant to entice investors to plow money into low-income areas across America designated as ‘opportunity zones.’ Institutions and wealthy investors that build in those areas can defer taxes on past capital gains, and avoid them on the future profits from their projects. Much of Long Island City sits in such a zone.”
“The timing was an ‘absolute coincidence,’ says Margaret Anadu, the head of Goldman Sachs’s Urban Investment Group, which did the deal. ‘I didn’t think New York was in the running, much less Long Island City’.”
Sure. It was a coincidence. Right. I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.
- KC's View:
