Finanskrisen och New York

Richard Florida har en intressant artikel i nya Atlantic om hur olika områden i USA kommer att påverkas av den ekonomiska krisen. Storstäderna i Boston-DC- korridoren kommer att klara sig ganska bra:

”The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation-to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.

In this sense, the financial crisis may ultimately help New York by reenergizing its creative economy. The extraordinary income gains of investment bankers, traders, and hedge-fund managers over the past two decades skewed the city’s economy in some unhealthy ways. In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city’s rising real-estate prices were affecting his company’s ability to attract global talent. He responded simply: “We are the cause, not the effect, of the real-estate bubble.” (As it turns out, he was only half right.) Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating.

When I asked Jacobs some years ago about the effects of escalating real-estate prices on creativity, she told me, “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.” With the hegemony of the investment bankers over, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate.”

Krisen kommer att slå hårdare mot mellanvästern, rostbältet och industristorstäderna i norr, Detroit, Cleveland.

I stort sett kan man säga att ju längre bort man befinner sig från de som bär skulden för finanskrisen – i New York och DC – desto värre kommer den att slå emot en.

Jag är rädd att det här även kommer att leda till ännu fler idiotiska New York-programledare som det här gänget från CNBC, som under en intervju med Nassim Taleb (som skrivit ”The black swan) och ekonomen Nouriel Roubini inte kan komma på något vettigare att fråga om än vilka aktietips de ska imponera med på nästa cocktailparty.