New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday he will not run for president or seek a fourth term at the helm of the US’s most populous city.

“Independents don’t run well in presidential elections,” said Bloomberg. “For me, the answer is no.”

Although first elected mayor of New York City in 2001 as a Republican, Bloomberg later changed his registration to independent. Bloomberg was elected to a third four-year term as an independent in 2009.

“You’ve got to be sorry for the president down in Washington,” Bloomberg told reporters on the sidelines of an environmental conference in Brazil’s biggest city of Sao Paulo. “Everything he does has to be passed by Congress. As mayor of New York, I administer the city’s agencies. It’s a perfect job for me because of my business background.”

Bloomberg said he would not run for a fourth term as mayor in 2013. “For one thing, the public wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “For another, I’m getting too old.”

He said he ran for a third term in 2009 “because I knew there might be some fiscal problems coming up and I thought I could help solve them, so I ran. It was the right thing.”

Bloomberg said New York’s public accounts were “in good order” following a period of cost reductions while improving efficiencies of city services. “During my time in office, operating costs for city services, except education, rose 27 percent against 33 percent inflation,” he said. “We’re doing more with less.”

He said education costs rose 105 percent during the same period “because of the need to invest seriously in education.”

(Source: MyFoxNY)