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The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore.

The World Trade Center was for me not only out of scale vertically, but it was also out of scale in plan. It occupied several blocks that were all massed together.

The Trade Center itself held - and holds - a special place, I think, in the hearts and minds of people in law enforcement - the fact that it did not fall in 1993. Ramzi Yousef's goal was to topple the Twin Towers into each other so that more people died than had died at Hiroshima.

Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower.

The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

PepsiCo is the largest food-and-beverage company in the United States, and the second-largest in the world after Nestle. If PepsiCo were a country, the size of its economy - sixty billion dollars in revenues in 2010 - would put it sixty-sixth in gross national product, between Ecuador and Croatia.

'The Panorama' is also the last place anywhere in New York where the World Trade Center still stands, whole, as it stood in the early morning of September 11. I can also see the corner where I saw the first tower fall and howled out loud. Seeing the buildings again here is uplifting, healing.

I think the World Trade Center should be rebuilt as the World Trade Center, only stronger and one story taller. I hate what they're doing with the World Trade Center site.

I still happen to think the United States is the greatest place in the world to invest.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.