The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Domestic Origins of Globalization

This chapter illuminates the relationship between New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975 and its reinvention as a global city in the 1980s. It argues that the city’s global turn was not a product of globalization; rather, the origins of “global” New York—and of the global city phenomenon more broadly—were located in U.S. national politics and policy. Specifically, it was the failures of federal urban policy, which the fiscal crisis embodied and accelerated, that led the city to pursue the expansion of its financial sector and seek new forms of foreign direct investment. New York’s rise as a global city in turn facilitated the transformation of U.S. global economic policy and prompted other cities around the world to adopt New York’s model.