From Chris Hynes China trip

My summer trip to China was summed up in a Tibetan monastery, as I saw the past Buddha, the present Buddha, and the future Buddha. I saw the ancient capital of Xian, with its terra cotta soldiers as monuments to man's bellicose nature. I saw the present capital of Beijing, with its Forbidden City, wide avenues, and Olympic Stadia, and I saw what perhaps may be the world capital of the future, Shanghai, with its brazen architecture, impossibly tall structures, and ttraffic that even New York can't match. If I were 20, the age at which I first saw New York and decided to move to the capital of the universe as soon as possible, I might make the same decision again in favor of Shanghai. New York replaced London as the financial capital as England became a debtor nation, dancing to America's tune, over the course of WW I. But who is the debtor, and who is the creditor now? Here's a link to an article on the subject of New York's pre-eminence in finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/techticker/article/286606/Wall-St.-in-Danger-of-Losing-Its-Crown-as-King-of-Finance. One of the fellows on our trip is a venture capitalist who was a former securities lawyer. He had come to China in 1986, and there were basically no tall buildings yet in Shanghai (now they build very tall ones in less than a year!). He was part of a group of lawyers advisng the Chinese on the creation of securities markets, how they would be structured and regulated, etc. It dawned on me that in 1994 I had made a speech on trading innovations in Milan to the FIBV, an international federation of stock exchanges. I was amazed to see representatives of about 35 Chinese stock exchanges. They all had high levels of automation and electronic audit trails, we we were still struggling with the occasional crooked floor broker or specialist. All that had happened in only 8 years. Today Shanghai claims to be the 6th largest exchange in the world. While in China it seemed that China was liberalizing investment rules that might bring more business to Shanghai. And the China Daily has reported that according to Bloomberg, China's equity market capitalization has again passed Japan as the world's second largest at $3.2 trillion. (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-07/20/content_8447558.htm)