In a speech yesterday...

...at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Michael Bloomberg criticized Washington's handling of the economy.

Now Mayor Bloomberg is a smart guy (and didn't become a billionaire by accident), but I still take issue with some of things he said (my emphasis):

Congress and the Obama administration, Mr. Bloomberg said, need to pump money into job placement services like those the Bloomberg administration has opened across New York City, through which tens of thousands of residents have found work; promote foreign trade with emerging economies that, like India, want to invest in the American economy; and simplify a thicket of federal regulations, especially those surrounding derivatives, which he said have created uncertainty in the market and have made businesses reluctant to invest.

Simplify regulations on derivatives? Wasn't lax regulation of derivatives one of the major causes of the financial crisis?

As he has in the past, the mayor defended corporations, and, implicitly, Wall Street, whose success, he said, has become a liability in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, when the federal government offered emergency loans to big banks and the automobile industry.

“It’s time to take a step back,” he said, “and ask ourselves, ‘When did success become a bad word in America?’ ”

Is he serious? The major banks failed in 2008. If not for the federal government, Citigroup and Bank of America would have surely gone under.

President Obama isn't hostile to the business community; he (and President Bush) saved the business community.