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  #1  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 1:58 AM
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Global Financial Centers Index: Vancouver among top 25 in world

This report first came to my attention on SSC. The Global Financial Centers Index report is published by the City of London:

http://217.154.230.218/NR/rdonlyres/...S_GFC7full.pdf

Highlights:
• Vancouver is ranked 23rd globally as a financial centre, just behind Paris, Taipei, and Guernsey, and just ahead of the Isle of Man, Dubai, and Montreal.
• Vancouver moved up 6 positions in rank from the previous GFCI report.
• Vancouver is ranked 7th in North America, behind New York, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington DC, and ahead of Montreal.
• The GFCI defines Vancouver as an "Established Transnational" financial centre offering services both "broad and deep". Others in this group include Boston, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Sydney, Stockholm and Tokyo.

Last edited by raggedy13; Mar 22, 2010 at 2:39 AM. Reason: fixed faulty link
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  #2  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 2:03 AM
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1- Dubai is not a real city
2- Any report that places Vancouver above Seattle on anything economic-related can't be taken seriously
3- I will nonetheless post this on the national section on SSC just to rile the forumers there
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  #3  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 2:08 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dleung View Post
1- Dubai is not a real city
2- Any report that places Vancouver above Seattle on anything economic-related can't be taken seriously
3- I will nonetheless post this on the national section on SSC just to rile the forumers there
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  #4  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 2:30 AM
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Vancouver is ahead of Montreal and Calgary didn't even make the list. Cool. London is number one so they must know what they're talking about.
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  #5  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 3:02 AM
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Originally Posted by Denscity View Post
Vancouver is ahead of Montreal and Calgary didn't even make the list. Cool. London is number one so they must know what they're talking about.
London being number One rings true, and Calgary, though important proprtionate to its size rings true, too. But I cannot believe we're ahead of Montreal.

Also, there were several different scales, and the cities were assigned different rankings on each one. It was a bit confusing for me to understand. A financial person would not have the same problem, I am sure.

Also - and very importantly - the cities were ranked within their "type" or "group" according to their characteristics. The page I saw on Google had Sydney ahead of Toronto, but in fact, it is more transnational in character, whereas Toronto IS a major world financial centre, classified as "BROAD AND DEEP," ranking with the big guys.
Still ....... where is Seattle?? (Boeing, Microsoft, et al). That doesn't make any sense that it isn't there at all!!!!

Last edited by trofirhen; Mar 22, 2010 at 3:34 AM.
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  #6  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 3:34 AM
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It's missing a lot of cities. Never mind Seattle, where is L.A.?
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  #7  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 3:33 AM
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Originally Posted by Denscity View Post
Vancouver is ahead of Montreal and Calgary didn't even make the list. Cool. London is number one so they must know what they're talking about.
Don't believe everything you read. Seattle is a more important financial centre than Vancouver, and they are NOWHERE to be found in that study.
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  #8  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 2:33 AM
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hard to understand........

The page posted by raggedy had expired, but I found it on Google.

It had several different scales, and I found it hard to understand.

However, on one scale, we were AHEAD (get this) of San Francisco and Frankfurt ! ! ! Not possible.! ! ! !

On another map we were 29th in the world, and San Fran was 8th, which is more like it.

Seattle would weigh in ahead of us any day, anyway, so while I think the ratings were put together with integrity, the results came out a little out of whack ! ! !
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  #9  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 2:40 AM
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^I fixed the link. Thanks for pointing that out.
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  #10  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 8:13 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dleung View Post
1- Dubai is not a real city
2- Any report that places Vancouver above Seattle on anything economic-related can't be taken seriously
3- I will nonetheless post this on the national section on SSC just to rile the forumers there
Be careful there. I find a number of our Montreal forumers here get quite sensitive about this kind of issue.
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  #11  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 2:07 AM
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So, what are everybody's thoughts on this ranking / report?

Personally I was surprised we would be ranked so highly. For example, there are a number of large American cities that I would imagine being higher than us as financial centers - I can only assume they're not considered because their services are largely US-focussed, rather than global.

It is interesting to see that we moved up 6 ranks as well. I assume this is largely due to Canadian cities and institutions weathering the economic downturn better than other countries. For example, Vancouver surpassed Dubai and Dublin in the ranking, cities both hit hard by the recession.

Another thing that surprised me was that we are ranked (just slightly) ahead of Montreal. I don't really know enough about Montreal's financial services (nor Vancouver's, honestly) to comment on this though. I know they would've been a more significant financial centre (at least in Canada) several decades ago but I would've thought they'd still be ranked higher than Vancouver.
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  #12  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 3:58 AM
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vancouver is strong in the wealth management sector
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  #13  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 5:31 AM
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Originally Posted by SpongeG View Post
vancouver is strong in the wealth management sector
Private banking is *huge* industry here with our exceptional foreign born residents who hide their money elsewhere .

HSBC, in particular, is quite involved with that in Vancouver, and it's far bigger than most would imagine. But is that enough?

Reminds me, ScotiaBank recently threw a lavish party for their top 250 private banking clients in Canada, in Vancouver. The vast majority already lived here.
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Last edited by Yume-sama; Mar 22, 2010 at 5:42 AM.
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  #14  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 6:05 AM
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With the collapse of Washington Mutual, Seattle's financial services sector took a massive hit that will continue to tarnish is reputation for years to come.
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  #15  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 7:04 AM
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Interesting report, although I didn't realize that, for the purposes of this report, Seoul was in Europe... (p.12)

Candidly, I'm a bit surprised by Vancouver's ranking, but then again it is one of two designated international finance centers in Canada with incentives designed to attract international finance activity. Also as Yume mentioned, private banking is big. But remember that part of the results of this report are a survey sent out to a sample of 1690 financial professionals, which seems rather a small sample size...

In general, though, I would guess that ratings of US cities tend to suffer because of regulation and disclosure issues (eg Sarbanes-Oxley). I was exploring listing a company on the AIM board of the London Stock Exchange a few years ago when Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in the US, and it was causing many foreign firms to consider moving their IPOs from the US to London.

Also, this survey measures global financial centers, and I would think most US financial centers are more focused on serving the domestic market. This would also explain Tokyo's ranking, which in absolute size is bigger than Hong Kong as a financial center, but ranks behind Hong Kong on this index since it primarily services the Japanese market.
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  #16  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 8:01 AM
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vancouver has a lot of foreign stuff, i think that's why it's been ranked high among global cities, demographics, companies etc...

dont know much about seattle...
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  #17  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 4:03 AM
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Well, for those of you that are kvetching, while I think ALL would agree about Seattle's financial power far outranks Vancouver's, this report says nothing of Vancouver being more powerful than Seattle....since Seattle is not found anywhere in the report.

The more valid question is then, under what parameters must a city have/fulfill in order to be included in this ranking. How were the cities in the rankings chosen and why were they chosen?

I'm sure that the report is for the City of London would influence, to some extent, which cities were included in the report.
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  #18  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 4:05 AM
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how about this

Quote:
For Americans, it is becoming increasingly clear that Athabasca represents our chief hope of not being held up at gunpoint by oil-controlling dictators, so the oil sector in Calgary is both economically interesting and strategically important. Given the size of the deposits, and Canada's political stability, Calgary is now a more important oil-investment nexus than either Houston or Abu Dhabi.

As I've researched gold-and-silver-mining companies over the past year, it has become increasingly clear to me that Canada is also the center for this sector, too. As Calgary is to oil, Vancouver is to gold-and-silver mining.

As is the case with oil, there is little point in investing in gold and silver mines in unstable countries; if the metals become scarce or if the price increases, you will only get expropriated. Thus, I am not a great fan of Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. (NYSE: CDE), because its largest silver mine is in Bolivia, a country where Western property rights are very poorly respected.

However, the Vancouver-based mining companies - whether we're talking about gold or other minerals - control a vast range of deposits throughout the Americas and represent a very interesting investment field, indeed.

In the old days, Vancouver was reputed to be full of crooks; the huge 1990s mining scandal of Bre-X got started when a tiny Calgary mining concern appeared to have made a major gold strike in Indonesia. The gold samples turned out to be fraudulent, a revelation that led to the company's collapse.
from this article: http://moneymorning.com/2010/03/16/invest-in-canada/
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  #19  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 5:01 AM
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This was informative:

http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/t...nce-techniques

Quote:
B.C.’s International Financial Activity Act, introduced in the late 1980s and modified in the early 2000s, includes a series of tax breaks for multinational companies with head offices in Vancouver. The act was designed specifically to complement the International Financial Centre of B.C. (IFCBC), which was established in 1986 in an attempt to lure international businesses to the province. It is aimed at the financial sector and businesses with overseas operations, and companies from any country qualify so long as they can claim a head office in B.C. The new rules set out in the program essentially changed B.C. into a tax haven by allowing financial transactions between related parties to qualify for exemptions on provincial tax, thus allowing Vancouver-based multinationals to repatriate tax-free income from their offshore subsidiaries. 


A good example of those incentives at work is in the mining sector. B.C.’s mining companies are big players in the provincial economy, but few of them have producing mines here. Instead, most are “head offices with investments abroad,”
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  #20  
Old Posted Mar 22, 2010, 5:04 AM
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Also of note:

http://www.bcctc.ca/conn19-3/vancouver.htm

Quote:
In addition to the more obvious attractions of doing business from Vancouver, the government has added tax incentives that provide some icing on the cake. Eligible international financial transactions are exempt from tax at either the federal, provincial or both levels. These exemptions were designed to attract international financial business that previously was not conducted in Canada, and therefore do not represent any loss of normal tax income.

What it does do is to create a new choice of employment for future generations. If we are successful, and there is every indication that we are already successful, then people will be able to do international financing of stocks, bonds, loans, financial advice, managing portfolios like they do in other major centres and pursue those careers right here in Vancouver rather than having to go to London or New York or Hong Kong or Toronto. We are creating a whole new range of jobs here in Vancouver that will allow us to keep our best and brightest and attract countless other bright people from other places.
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