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 headquarters here because of the UK’s departure.
He said 20 of the top 25 financial services companies had hubs in Ireland alongside most of the top US tech firms.
The three-time mayor of New City and founder of Bloomberg media group also claimed that Ireland and the US had switched roles economically.
“Ireland is the one that’s growing and America is the one that’s worried about growth,” he said.
The US, he said, was in a difficult situation politically and that he had been as surprised as anyone to find out the US had bombed Iran over the weekend.
He also claimed that the current Washington administration was in danger of throwing away the political and economic capital the US had built up over decades with other countries.
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“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 can’t explain,” he said.
Mr Bloomberg said he was not a supporter of the current US government and disagreed strongly with the policies being pursued by President Donald 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, who ran for the US presidency as a Democrat in 2020, has had a tetchy relationship with Mr Trump.
He has previously called 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.
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 (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) 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 European Union 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.
Also speaking at the event was Minister for Finance Paschal Donohue, who highlighted the strength of Ireland’s public finances despite the wider global turmoil.
He noted that up to €15 billion will be set aside in the State’s two savings funds by the end of this year.
Asked how corporate tax receipts had performed in June following a surprise drop in May, Mr Donohoe said he had a “sense of where they are”.
“If you look at where we are overall, we’ve seen so far another strong performance overall, year-to-date,” he said, noting this was the reason why the country had been running healthy budget surpluses.
Mr Donohoe warned again that up to 75,000 jobs may be lost or not created over the next three years - with 1-1.5 percentage points knocked off growth - if EU-US tariff talks fail.
