Power Players: What does Mamdani's Manhattan mean for the world?

**Michelle Fleury** (0:00)
Beneath the buzz of an epic New York summer from New York Knicks historic championship to the World Cup crowds and of course the 250th flotilla, tensions between City Hall and Wall Street's wealthiest is rising. While millions cheer, locals are panicking over whether they can even afford to live here.

**Will Bain** (0:19)
Enter at the back end of last year, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is asking a radical question. Should the free market decide the price of your housing and your utilities or should it be the state?

**Michelle Fleury** (0:31)
Well, supporters are calling this consumer socialism. Wall Street calls it a nightmare. Today, we're asking can consumer socialism actually co-exist with global capitalism?
Welcome back to Business Daily. Things are going to sound a little different today because Raoul Tandon is taking a well-deserved few weeks off. So for now, it is just the two of us. I'm Michelle Fleury in New York.

**Will Bain** (1:00)
And I'm Will Bain here in the studio in the UK and not gorging at a Kolkata golf course, which is where I saw a picture of Mr. Tandon a little earlier today, Michelle.

**Michelle Fleury** (1:10)
Oh, that sounds delightful. Anyway, well, not the golf bit, but being on holiday.

**Will Bain** (1:15)
But you're in the happiest place in the world, as you were saying at the moment. I mean, New York, the kind of vibes there this summer, as someone sat thousands of miles away on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, has looked pretty bonkers. They had a pretty good summer, haven't they?

**Michelle Fleury** (1:27)
I've got to say, I mean, it has felt like one very long party, starting with the Knicks winning the championship in a kind of fairy tale way. We had that wonderful ticker tape parade, not far from where I'm talking to you right now. But no, it does feel appropriate that you and I are talking across the Atlantic today, because PowerPlayer's story stretches right across and it starts, as these things often do, with one person.

**Will Bain** (1:51)
Yeah, Zohran Mamdani, who we mentioned. And he is very much riding that kind of good vibes wave, isn't he? And surfing it perfectly, it seems. His pitch perfect political speech, it seemed, off the back of that Knicks NBA championship to reveling as a football fan in the World Cup coming to town, even securing some cheap tickets for locals there as well. And we thought he was of interest, not just because it's a good excuse for Michelle and I to chat about something that we've chatted about in the past on Business Daily and use Michelle's kind of local hometown expertise. But where we are, there are a lot of people looking at what's going on with Mayor Mamdani, looking for left-leaning, left-of-centre economic answers, economic populist answers often. And they are seeing the sort of perceived success that Mayor Mamdani is having, certainly in his election results, and going, you know what, maybe we should have a crack at that here. And I think our listeners, wherever they are, perhaps they are in Europe, will hear lots of that with some of the big elections, French presidential election, for example, in the next couple of years. But also at kind of city levels, as Mamdani is showing to right around the world. So I think it's kind of a really interesting area, isn't it? That he's kind of a test case that others are fairly obviously going to try and follow.

**Michelle Fleury** (2:57)
Yeah, I mean, I think he sort of seemed to come out of the blue.
Obviously, you know, residents in Queens would disagree with me here in New York City, because that's where he was a politician before becoming the mayor. But, you know, he wasn't that well known. And yet, he used, I guess, something we've seen a little bit in politics before, but he used it very effectively, and that is the power of social media. And he created this persona that really kind of took off, but it was also controversial. And now he's kind of succeeded, I guess, in the election. People didn't think he could on policies that people thought wouldn't fly in, you know, the capital of capitalism.

**Will Bain** (3:35)
Yeah, anti-establishment, as you say, but also harnessing people's rage. That again is the bit that might be familiar to lots of our listeners, even if you're not in the United States. People feeling that they're economically really stuck, that politicians haven't had answers for changing that, and that they need radical ways to get out of that, right? And this consumer socialism idea is one of those. Here we go, we're gonna have a stab at trying to explain this in plain English. But in essence, if socialism itself is really kind of interested in who kind of controls work and about how work is done, this is actually really about cost of living and about prices, isn't it? It's about controlling the prices that people pay by the state and hoping that that gives them kind of sort of financial firepower to use that in other areas of the economy, I guess, to take that pressure off them.