From The Political Economy of Bloombergism (emphasis added):

Via Mark Thoma, Daniel Little has a nice survey essay on Saskia Sassen’s concept of the global city (pdf). These are cities that concentrate high-level coordination functions for the global economy — finance, in particular — and exhibit extraordinary concentrations of wealth as a consequence. New York and London are the prime examples…

If you’re interested in this stuff, you should also read John Quiggin’s cynical but plausible take (pdf): Quiggin suggests that the reason finance and similar activities concentrate in a handful of global cities isn’t because that produces gains in economic efficiency, it’s because of the enhanced opportunities for cronyism; it’s a lot easier to make implicitly corrupt deals when you have lunch in the same restaurants and your kids go to the same expensive private school…

…as the Bloomberg era draws to a close in New York, there has been a fair amount of speculation on why Bloomberg was such a success but Bloombergism — his mix of social liberalism and pro-finance economic policy — has been such a bust on the national political scene… Bloombergism played well with the global elite, which really doesn’t care what other people do in their bedrooms but cares a lot about being left free to rake in the moolah, which judges a man not by the color of his skin but by the size of his portfolio… Even a bit of redistribution was OK, if it seemed to contribute to a nicer environment in which to enjoy the remaining 99.9 percent of one’s income… But the rest of America is nothing like that.

Bonus Bloomberg smackdown here.

And, on the theme of “weasels”, a story from yesterday’s NY Times, Reaping Profit After Assisting on [Pres. Obama’s] Health Law.