This short WSJ ($) article left me shaking my head:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed consulting firm McKinsey & Co. yesterday to examine why more international companies are choosing to raise money outside of New York.
The two-month, $600,000 study comes as many of the largest initial stock offerings bypass a listing with NYSE Group Inc. and Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. for listings in London or in their home markets. Mr. Bloomberg and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) will review the results in an effort to improve New York’s position as a financial center.
Many big international IPOs no longer want to have their shares listed on a Western stock market, in part because they want local investors or because big international investment firms can often buy the stock even if its not listed in New York. Out of the top 25 global IPOs in each of the last two years, London snagged 11 listings, Hong Kong picked up six and New York received four, according to recent data.
Regulation costs, legal risks and increased white-collar-crime enforcement also get a lot of attention. The four-year-old U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley accounting-and-governance law has made it more expensive for companies, especially smaller ones, to list.
Investment-bank underwriting fees are also substantially lower in London — 3% to 4% of IPO receipts, compared with 6.5% to 7% in the U.S., according to a June report commissioned by the City of London.
Yesterday, at a private-equity conference in New York sponsored by Dow Jones & Co., Nasdaq Chief Executive Bob Greifeld said he couldn’t think of a reason for the difference in the IPO fees and predicted that there would be more pricing pressure on U.S. underwriting fees in coming years.

Mayor Bloomberg should save his city’s money. For the answer to the question posed, all the Mayor needs to do is talk to his state’s future governor and examine this mindset, which the future governor embraces. That mindset leads to abominations such as this and this, which business owners tend to notice after awhile. Indeed, the proponents of such dubious policies are widely-publicizing them to the international business community.
All of this has already contributed greatly to U.S. public companies and executive talent fleeing in droves to private equity. Why on earth would any international company choose to raise public money in such an environment?