Billionaire Magnets

Roger Cohen writes, often with an oddly personal touch, for The New York Times. In today's column, he describes New York and London as the world's two uber-citystates. Cohen describes how money flows to London, and New York, from the third world.

Having made it big in autocratic countries with parlous legal systems (if that), a cowed press and rampant corruption — say, Russia and China — oligarchs and crony capitalists wake up one day and find that, gosh, they like nothing as much as democratic systems under the rule of law held accountable by an independent press. Having trashed the West, they trust the West with their money.

This then is the way the world works: Autocratic hyper capitalism without Western checks and balances produces new elites whose dream is an American or British lifestyle and education for their children, and whose other goal, knowing how their own capricious systems really function, is to buy into the rule of law by acquiring real estate (in London or New York).

In Western Wyoming, the joke about the Jackson Hole resort area is that (mostly domestic) billionaires are buying out the mere millionaires. The airport tarmac looks like an executive jet showroom.