Millionaires in London and New York

The bread and butter of the economies of New York and London, the financial services industry, is renowned for delivering high salaries and creating high net worth individuals. The difference in the number of millionaires in either city is remarkably different though. New York has 667,200 millionaires - more than Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco combined. There are only 448,000 in the whole of the UK of which around 40% live in the capital which makes roughly 183,700 in London.

New York also has more billionaires than London with 60, Michael Bloomberg being the

wealthiest with a fortune of $18 billion (£11.5 billion). Other notable billionaire residents of the Big Apple include Ralph Lauren ($4.6bn/£3bn), Rupert Murdoch ($6.3bn/£4bn) and Donald Trump ($2bn/£1.3bn). Billionaires in London number 36 headed by Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon whose $28.7 billion (£18.5 billion) fortune makes him the fourth richest person in the world who is joined by, amongst others, Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson ($4bn/£2.6bn) and Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone ($2.25bn/£1.5bn).

The difference in number of high net worth individuals does not

seem to correspond to the populations of both cities. The crucial information may be in looking at overall productivity. New York's gross domestic product is $1.406trillion compared with $565billion

for London.

Synopsis of Airports in London and New York

I'm going to focus on the main airports of each city as there are countless other airports around London and New York which don't carry nearly as many passengers. New York is served by John F Kennedy (approx. 46 million passengers 2009), La Guardia (approx. 23 million passengers 2008) and Newark Liberty (approx. 35.4 million passengers 2008). London is served by Heathrow (66 million passengers 2009) , Gatwick (32,5 million passengers 2009), Stansted (20 million passengers 2009) and London City to a lesser degree (2.8 million passengers 2009) although it's quite important for business travellers. So roughly 104.4 million passengers passing through New York's airports and 121.3 million through London.

Heathrow is clearly the biggest of these airports, the busiest international airport in the world, although plans to build a third runway have recently been scrapped. Heathrow will probably continue to deliver regular delays as long as it does not

have enough runway space. In terms of customer experience, Heathrow has five terminals, each of which are completely different from terminal 1, which is very dated, to terminal 5 which opened in 2008, cost £4.2bn to build and comprises the largest free standing building in the UK, so it's very difficult to give the airport an overall rating. I love the new terminal 5 as access from the M25 is very easy and for such a big terminal car to airside is very quick. Terminal 5 would seem to be paying off for the British Airports Authority (BAA) who said it recorded it's busiest ever month in July with 6.7 million passengers in the month which was a 3.5% increase from July 2009.

New York's La Guardia delivers a very chaotic experience to passengers with a lot of overcrowding. La Guardia, according to one Port Authority official, is so outdated it needs to be torn down. The travel experience here worsened post 9/11 with tighter security but the most exciting development with these airports since Heathrow's Terminal 5 was announced last week

by Delta Airlines, the Port Authority and JFK with plans for the enhancement and expansion of terminal 4. The project is going to cost $1.2bn and will help transform JFK into one of the most state of the art airports inthe US. At the moment Delta operates predominently out of terminal 2 for domestic flights and terminal 3 for international. The expansion of terminal 4 will replace outdated terminal 3 facilities and there will also be upgrading the inter-terminal connectors between terminals 2 and 4 as well as dual taxiways.

http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&item=1095

The first airport I ever went through in the US was Newark airport. It was a long time ago and I still remember how rude I found the staff to be there. I have read a lot of customer reviews on Newark airport and staff rudeness is probably the most frequent complaint from users. In nearly 15 years, this place hasn't changed! Customer non-service aside, Newark is another ageing airport albeit still kept fairly clean.

In contrast to Heathrow's increase in passenger numbers in July, Gatwick, which was sold to Global Infrastructure Partners for £1.5bn this year, fell by 3.1% for the year on year month of July. However, just like Heathrow, a further runway was ruled out to increase volumes due to the high cost of a planning application, thought to be somewhere between £100m and £200million. GIP's preference for increasing the existing runways capacity is to request an increase in the number of permitted take offs and landings. Stansted completes the hat trick of London airports with abandoned plans for a further runway in the face of campaigns against development. Stansted is a major European hub for low cost airlines to holiday destinations.

In terms of the whole experience, there is no airport in London or New York that is really delightful. Both cities have grown organically and all airports have been yanked along with their legs trying to play catch up with the growth in passenger numbers in and out of each city. The net result is that London and New York have airports that are there to serve the purpose and although JFK and Heathrow have big ideas, they are all a long way behind the likes of Frankfurt and Hong Kong.

Central Park, New York City

Thank you very much to readers for bearing with me whilst I have been away in glorious Melbourne and unable to provide much content for my blog. I will be resuming posts from hereon in so here is a short video on Central Park to get started.

Article from The Guardian about London v New York

In February 2007, The Guardian Newspaper published a piece on London and New York -

The extraordinary strength of London's property market continues to be driven by demand from the top, and luxury apartments are achieving the highest prices in the world with four new penthouses at the Lord Rogers-designed One Hyde Park reported to be on sale for £84m each. New York still has more billionaires, with 40, but London has moved into third place on Forbes magazine's billionaires league table, with 23 (Moscow, in second place, has 25).

Workers in the City of London last year took home £8.8bn, with 4,000 employees receiving bonuses of more than £1m. Last year foreign firms spent £97bn buying British companies, while 367 companies came to the London stock exchange, compared with 270 on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq combined. Between 2002 and 2005, London's financial workforce grew by 4.3% to 318,000 while New York's declined by 0.7% to 328,400 jobs. And London's share of the top 50 hedge funds is growing, from three in 2002 to 12 in 2006, while New York's declined over the same period from 28 to 18.

London salerooms continue to break records with new buyers including Russians and Chinese. Sotheby's sold £167m worth of art in the past week. The weakness of the dollar has meant American collectors are choosing to sell in London while New York dealer Andrew Fabricant was named as the buyer of Francis Bacon's Study for Portrait II, sold for a record £14m at Christie's on Thursday night.

While the reopening of New York's Museum of Modern Art was initially regarded as a success, critics have since turned on it and pointed out that while Tate Modern attracts 3.9m visitors, Moma can only manage 2.7m. Both cities shuttled 12m people through the doors of their theatres, but artistically the iniative is with the Brits. David Hare and Tom Stoppard both have shows on Broadway while Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was one of several West End musicals to make the transfer.

Neither city scored well on a quality-of-life survey conducted among expatriate staff in which Zurich and Geneva scored highest. London managed 39th place, but New York was even lower at 46th.

Eurostar connects London to Europe's most vibrant cities.

One extraordinary feature of London's transport network is it's connectivity with European cities by rail.