9 hours ago
Brexit was ‘single stupidest thing a country's ever done'
Brexit
was 'the single stupidest thing any country's ever done,' businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has said.
Speaking at an event to launch Bloomberg's new offices in Dublin, Mr Bloomberg said part of Ireland's recent economic success had come courtesy of Brexit with more companies choosing to locate their European hubs here as a result because of the UK's departure.
He highlighted how 20 of the top 25 financial services companies had hubs in Ireland alongside most of the top US tech firms.
Mr Bloomberg also claimed that Ireland and the US, under president Donald Trump, had switched roles economically.
READ MORE
'Ireland is the one that's growing and America is the one that's worried about growth,' he said.
The three-time mayor of New City and founder of Bloomberg media group said the US was in a difficult situation politically and was in danger of throwing away the political and economic capital it had built up over decades with other countries.
'America has just spent the last 70 years trying to build relationships with other countries ... and we're throwing away a lot of that ... which I just can't explain,' he said.
Mr Bloomberg said he was not a supporter of the current US administration and disagreed strongly with the policies being pursued by Mr Trump
'Although I know Donald Trump and I've known him for 30 or 40 years ... when I was mayor of New York, he was a real estate developer in New York City and only went bankrupt six times,' he said.
Mr Bloomberg has a tetchy relationship with the current White House incumbent and has previously called him in a 'pathological liar' and a 'barking clown' while Mr Trump deprecatingly refers to him as 'Mini Mike'.
'He's a pleasant guy if you sat and had dinner with him, having said that I don't agree with his policies at all,' Mr Bloomberg said.
Highlighting the deeply partisan nature of the US politics, he said he had endeavoured to keep Bloomberg as editorially balanced as possible 'with the same number of conversative and liberal reporters' while staying out of politics himself. Mr Bloomberg ran for the US presidency as a Democrat in 2020.
He said Bloomberg had doubled its Irish workforce to 150 in the last two years and the Dublin office located in the recently developed Charlemont Square scheme in Dublin city centre was now one of its largest in Europe.
The Dublin office has plans to take on a further 25 staff, mainly in the engineering category.
Mr Bloomberg claimed Ireland's success in attracting business was partly down to the high level of students entering STEM courses.
At 32 per cent, he said this was double the rate of US students going into science and technology courses and the highest rate in the EU in per capita terms.
'So it's not just the regulatory environment that is attractive to employers here. First and foremost it's the quality of the workforce, educated, skilled, English-speaking,' he said
