THE COMPETITION between New York City and London threatens to get out of hand. New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, a billionaire capitalist, trekked to London to see how Red Ken Livingstone, the communist mayor of London, runs things. Well, not precisely. But he did come to see how Callum McCarthy, chairman of the Financial Services Administration, is regulating the financial sector that seems to be wooing business from New York at an alarming rate. “London is gaining on us in area after area,” moans Bloomberg.
Perhaps even more important, the ordinarily dull New York Times, under the headline, “The Best Town to Make an Upper Lip Stiff,” quotes New York saloonkeeper Audrey Saunders as concluding, “London is the best cocktail city in the world right now. I hate to admit it, but it’s true.” It’s one thing for a New York investment banker to lose a big deal to a London rival, quite another to know that the victor is celebrating in a bar superior to one in which the loser is drowning his sorrow.
