While waiting for some new data and a Supreme Court decision, we’ll interrupt the series of posts on making adjustments to the pillaging of our existing institutions to report some good news: New York City is getting better at allowing people to create new ones. People who have started their own business have told me the most important factor in their success is not the ability to create to good product or service, but the ability to sell it. Customers were the scarcest resource even before the global crisis of demand created by the end of the U.S. consumer debt binge. And metropolitan New York, combining a large population, above average incomes, and a large and diverse potential business client base, has lots of potential customers. Many of which can be reached in person in a small area in or near Manhattan. Combine that with a large and talented workforce and global connections, and I think the song “New York, New York” had it exactly backward. This is, or ought to be, a fertile ground for the new.

While New York as a place is hospitable to entrepreneurs, however, New York as a political culture has traditionally been hostile. To New York’s Democratic establishment the only good business is an existing business, preferably a large corporation that that makes campaign contributions. This bias has come out in a variety of ways, from tax breaks and subsidies to big companies, to complex and obsolete regulations that are only enforced against those who don’t play ball, to calls for commercial rent control. Wall Street may have both the Democrats and the Republicans in their pocket, but in the past New York’s Democratic politicians have shown zero interest in new businesses, and have generally preferred to preside over subsidized decline. A few years ago I had wondered why Mayor Bloomberg, coming into politics from the outside as someone who have founded a large company himself, hadn’t done more promote New York as a place to “take your shot.” But I’m pleased to report there has been a change large enough for someone like myself, on the outside, to notice it. But I have a question. Where is the attempt to encourage new banks?