Josh Barro, Columnist

Chris Christie's Failed State Capitalism

August 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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In a case study showing that not all bipartisanship is good, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, has worked with his Democratic legislature to get his state invested in not one but two troubled real-estate megaprojects.

One is American Dream Meadowlands, a partly-built mega-mall just outside New York City that boasts an indoor ski slope. American Dream is more widely known by its former name, "Xanadu," but that name became so tainted by the project's troubles that rebranding was needed.