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.