May 5, 2009 City Council packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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Springfield were among the country's most productive industrial cities, and America's population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By r9oo, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory- cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo. How might various cities and regions fare as the crash of 2oo8 reverberates into 2009, 2010, and beyond? Which places will be spared the worst pain, and which left permanently scarred? Let's consider how the crash and its aftermath might affect the economic landscape in the long run, from coast to coast —beginning with the epicenter of the crisis and the nation's largest city, New York. WHrrHER NEw YORK? At first glance, few American cities would seem to be more obviously threatened by the crash than New York. The city shed almost 17,000 jobs in the financial industuy alone from October 2007 to October 2008, and Wall Street as we've known it has ceased to exist. `Farewell Wall Street, hello Pudong?' begins a recent article by Marcus Gee in the Toronto Globe and Mail, outlining the possibility that New York's central role in global finance may soon be usurped by Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other Asian and Middle Eastern financial capitals. This concern seems overheated. In his sweeping history-, Capitals of, Capital, the economic historian Youssef Cassis chronicles the rise and decline of global financial centers through recent centuries. Though the history is long, it contains little drama: major shifts in capitalist power centers occur at an almost geological pace. Amsterdam stood at the center of the world's financial system in the i7th century; its place was taken by London in the early 19th century, then New York in the loth. Across more than three centuries, no other city has topped the list of global financial centers. Financial capitals have `remarkable longevity," Cassis writes, "in spite of the phases of boom and bust in the course of their existence." The transition from one financial center to another typically lags behind broader shifts in the economic balance of power, Cassis suggests. Although the U.S. displaced England as the world's largest economy well before igoo, it was not until after World War Ii that New York eclipsed London as the world's preeminent financial_ center (and even then, the eclipse was not complete; in recent years, London has, by some measures, edged out New York). As Asia 4