If all politics is local, as the venerable politician Tip O’Neill once said, then one can understand why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending this week gallivanting about China.
After all, New York City has strong connections with China.
Consider that 450,000 New York City residents have roots in China, more than in any other city outside of Asia. There are 2,500 Chinese restaurants in New York City.
Bopping around China won’t hurt Bloomberg get votes at home. He’s in Shanghai today, a city not unlike New York with its soaring skyscrapers and humming financial industry. He was in Beijing Monday and Tuesday.
In addition to opening an office of the New York Stock Exchange in Beijing, Bloomberg’s offered two public speeches while here, both decidedly pro-market.
In both speeches, Bloomberg extolled market competition as a way to create incentives for China and the U.S. to grow stronger from each side’s comparative advantages.
He says U.S. open-door immigration policies are essential. In a speech today at Fudan University in Shanghai, Bloomberg said that half the Americans who have won Nobel Prizes in physics in the past seven years are foreign-born, and that more than half the Ph.D.s working in the U.S. are immigrants. Here is an excerpt:
“The U.S. and China are in a competition for talent, and each of us has certain competitive advantages that we can take greater advantage of. The U.S. is a magnet for talent. China is a magnet for capital. In the U.S., our challenge is to open our labor markets to more foreign workers, while in China, it seems the challenge is to open capital markets to more foreign investment – because foreign investment creates the domestic jobs that will help keep educated Chinese men and women from leaving the country.”
He went on to say that low wages and taxes are not the be-all and end-all for investors in the global economy, and that’s where China he gave a gentle tweak to China.
“(Investors) also consider: whether corruption is a typical part of doing business, whether income statements are transparent, whether monetary policy is likely to promote stability, whether effective quality and safety standards are enforced, whether the economy is guided by the free hand of the market or the heavy hand of government, whether you will be able to retain ownership of your ideas and capital, and whether government requires businesses to jump over expensive and time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles.
“The United States has strategic advantages in all of these areas – but we can do more to sharpen them. For instance, we have some of the strongest investor protections in the world – but our regulatory apparatus has become more cumbersome than it needs to be.”
While China is strong in attracting investment, it lags on matters like standards for quality, health, labor and safety. Bloomberg said those quality-of-life issues are key ingredients to a successful economy.
“As the Mayor of a city where you can hear 200 languages spoken on the street, I believe that there is no better example of how diversity strengthens a society than New York City. New York ’s incredible cultural diversity is perhaps the single greatest competitive advantage that we have.
“Because in the global economy, talented people want to live in places that offer not only exciting careers, diverse cultural opportunities, safe streets, good schools, and clean air, they also want to live where they are free to be themselves.”
Mike Bloomberg is better than everyone else running for President right now, and his visit to China proves this. He understands the global economy in a way that no-one else does.
Lets Draft Mike Bloomberg at http://www.uniteformike.com Join us and sign the petition!
Posted by: Andrew MacRae | December 30, 2007 at 11:40 AM