World without...WALL STREET.

[T51R]

After someone on Wall Street shortchanged a certain Alien Emissary by a penny, she gets pissed off and tears the entire chunk of real estate out of the planet's crust from where FDR Drive meets the Brooklyn Bridge, to inches before the WTC memorial. (She spares the memorial because she thinks humans should remember their own brutality towards each other, and never repeat it...)

The world's financial hub is now floating somewhere in space beyond the boundary of the visible universe after being thrown there.

How quickly can our financial system adapt to Wall Street suddenly being replaced by an extension of the Upper Bay Area?

OR, will it not adapt at all?

[Tami]

You are familiar with the Crash of the 1930"s? The Great Depression? This would be hundreds of times worse. The UK is already vulnerable thanks to Brexit, so it's going to suffer badly. Businesses fold, employment rises. Not to mention homes foreclosures, lose of private investments driving people into poverty, the social impact would be devastating. Suicide rates would rise, you name it.

There are stock markets around the world, but Wall Street is the biggest and most far reaching. Every country will be negativity affected by it.

[Totoro Man]

and it gets better. people will STILL be complaining about the 1%. there has always been, and will always be, a 1%. for some reasons Americans have convinced themselves that they live in a classless society with limitless upward mobility... because that's the American dream, or something. that's not how things really work, though.

for me, complaining about the 1% is akin to complaining about apex predators like sharks and lions. yeah, it makes sense on an emotional level - but when you stop to think about it, there's really nothing more you can do.

if we get rid of the current 1% a new generation shows up to replace it. for every bloodthirsty revolution that destroyed the wealthy 1% we hate so much-- we simply find that it gets replaced with a different set of people who end up making all of the same abuses of power and influence. as bad as the Tsarists in Russia were... it's hard to imagine them being worse than Stalin or Beria.

it's funny, because a lot of the elite Chinese families that were running things under Chiang Kai Shek defected to the Communists in order to maintain their power and influence. they figured if they threw their lot in with Mao then they might be awarded some enviable administrative positions... and, frequently, they were. "meet the new boss. same as the old boss."

getting rid of Wall Street, as Tami pointed out, wouldn't improve anything. it would actually make things worse.

[StupidMoniker]

The physical removal of the trading floor and a bunch of bank offices? There would be significant fallout from the devastation of such an attack on American soil, but the financial underpinnings of the country would be fine. Trading would simply be moved to a new physical location, bank headquarters would be re-established somewhere else (either elsewhere in New York or in another city. London and Tokyo may become even more important exchanges. NASDAQ may be used to just absorb the NYSE.

[The MunchKING]

Most of the data is online anyway, and presumably backed up in case of less dramatic loss of the physical offices.