It is in the back and forth between theory and practice, conceptualization and the field, that lies the key to understanding economic phenomena. This is how my economic analyzes emerge, and not in a constructivism that I refute. The United States, where I lived for many years, where I am active in real estate, have always been my favorite playground for this empirical analysis, notwithstanding the vagaries due to Covid in recent months. My recent stay there, in Florida and then in New York, was all the more instructive as I had been unable to travel the field in 2021.
For the entrepreneur who travels this State-Continent again, what strikes first is the coexistence of an extremely strong growth (but threatened by the general opinion) with his typically American state of mind so optimistic, and a galloping inflation which gangrenes the country and tarnishes the party in a certain way. Restaurants and hotels in tourism, construction firms in real estate, have passed on to a consumer – helped by the Federal State (Helicopter Money) and benefiting from low unemployment – rising commodity prices. The nature of the service in general has changed: the phenomenon of the Great Resignation, after the Covid layoffs, has led many Americans to leave these odd jobs in tourism or catering. They reinvented their lives and never came back. Thus, service companies have to revise their schedules, make do with an immigrant workforce most of the time, and to tell the truth, in New York for example, the quality of service is no longer what it she once was.
We also touch on the ground the gap between Florida, which never really closed its economy during the Covid crisis, and New York, in strong recovery but which was confined for a long time in 2020: the closings of businesses (accentuated by the switch to the Internet), empty office spaces, barely convalescing hotels, attest to a slow urban recovery which essentially awaits the return of tourists and the arrival of new generations of graduates, little interested in the Covid or through life in the countryside like their elders who fled the city in 2020.
Florida, like most of the southern United States, has not experienced the pangs of confinement and is experiencing an unprecedented real estate boom: we find the excesses of 2006-2007 there, however, with indiscriminate purchases, but Miami’s key districts are now at the level – and this will be permanent – of the major American cities (Los Angeles, New York) because many non-tourist industries (tech, start-ups, biotech, finance) have settled there. The Florida economy centered on heliotropism has given way to a kind of new diversified (without oil) and international Texas, due to its openness to Latin America. My Hispanic contacts in Florida told me that they actually live in an economic zone which is that of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, a world economy in the Braudelian sense which goes from Mexico to Florida via the Gulf of Louisiana and includes of course all the Caribbean islands. Ignoring borders, Miami projects itself towards its Mexican counterpart which shares its excesses, Cancun, like its inner suburbs. Thus, this Trumpist state, governed by De Santis, assumes its multiculturalism as long as order and legality are respected (no total immigration).
New York shares this post-Covid real estate boom with Miami, in particular the appetite for residential construction. The traditional office is quickly buried, no one returns to work in the old towers (but the new spaces, adapted to environmental standards and to the pandemic, are all the rage) and we discover developers who are embarking on the conversion of these buildings from offices….in apartments! The new town hall drastically limits new hotel permits after the Covid crisis, except for those who, like my team and I, were able to recover titled sites before the crisis…
But New York, constantly reinventing itself, is discovering assets in the new industry that is unleashing passions and dreams in the United States: everything related to cryptos, DeFi, Web 3.0 and even metaverse… While Silicon Valley is the cradle of American technology (many big Bitcoin companies have been born there), which many states are fighting to offer a regulatory and fiscal framework conducive to this industry (Wyoming, Utah, Colorado), or attracting billions in venture capital the start-ups of the sector or the congresses of this industry (Texas, Florida, Nevada), it is indeed New York which has attracted record levels of venture capital investment in the sector over the past two years. First of all, New York, for the past ten years, has no longer simply been the city of financiers, lawyers or advertisers: it has become the second tech center in the country, with a real start-up culture, which attracts, for example, many French. But above all, crypto or DeFi (decentralized finance), it remains… finance! What better place to develop new financial protocols, trading, loans, and attract investors who know these issues… than New York? The capital of TradFi, without denying its origins, is moving quite logically towards DeFi.
This joyful entrepreneurial effervescence is of course threatened by inflation and the rise in interest rates that has begun: a slowdown, or a minor recession (with a sharp stock market correction) seems inevitable before the end of the year. But as always, under the Schumpeterian principle of creative renewal, the next cluster of innovations for the decade is well underway in the United States.
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