The letters are stamped all over the hallways of Chicago’s giant skyscrapers and grand office buildings. DRW, IMC, CME, Cboe.
“We don’t want to leave,” said Ed Tilly, the chief executive officer of Cboe Global Markets Inc., the firm behind Wall Street’s so-called “fear gauge,” the VIX. “But we cannot be in a position where we are disadvantaged in the most competitive markets in the world, where our competitors don’t face the same economics that we would.”
“We know the financial transaction one has been highly debated and there may be merit in that, but we look forward to that debate,” he said. “What the mayor has said is that solutions cannot disproportionately impact the working and middle class of our city.” But in the midst of the campaign, Johnson promised not to raise property taxes, a pledge he stuck to in his 2024 budget proposal released September 13. That’s left him very limited options for coming up with the money.
Packing up and leaving isn’t as hard as it used to be in the heydays of trading floors, when dealers wearing colorful jackets roamed the streets of Chicago and shouted orders at each other in the city’s infamous pits.