When Bill de Blasio was running for mayor on a starkly liberal platform in 2013, some of New York’s business leaders feared the city’s economic well-being was doomed.

“There was definitely something in the ether,” said Alicia Glen, a deputy mayor whom Mr. de Blasio recruited from Wall Street. “‘The lefties are taking over.’ ‘This is not a pro-business mayor.’ ‘They’re going to ruin the economy.’ I heard a lot of that myself.”

It did not help that Mr. de Blasio was hoping to succeed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a self-made billionaire and a darling of business elites.

But as Mr. de Blasio settles into the second half of his four-year term, the opposite has happened. Even amid national and global concerns about teetering economies, New York City has rarely been in better financial shape. Indeed, the city added more jobs in Mr. de Blasio’s first two years in office — 248,000 — than in any two-year period in the last half-century, according to data released last week by the State Labor Department.