Wall St. crisis caps streak of defeats for NYC
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NEW YORK - This big, brash, in-your-face city suddenly seems to have lost its mojo.
At the beginning of the year, there was supercharged hype over the possibility that two, even three New Yorkers may be squaring off against one another for president. But now Republican former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Independent, are sitting on the sidelines while the action is in Chicago and Arizona.
In September, the New York Mets collapsed again before reaching the National League playoffs, and the Yankees were left out of the postseason for the first time since 1995. Baseball is being played in October, but not in New York.
On top of all that gloom comes the spectacular implosion of Wall Street, where some of the city's most storied financial behemoths - Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers,
There are projections of thousands of lost jobs in the financial services sector, and the continuing plunge in stock prices has forced dramatic and sudden changes in the lifestyles of some of New York's wealthiest.
Bookings for private jets are way down, and yacht rentals are drying up. Young Manhattanites are giving up the multimillion-dollar lofts they can no longer afford. The decade-long real estate boom appears to have stalled, with new projects on hold and existing skyscrapers difficult to refinance. New Yorkers are scaling back plans for big weddings and bar mitzvahs. Even a staple of life in the city, eating out, has taken a hit.
"Businesses are having tremendous difficulty getting money, and there's a loss of confidence in the marketplace," said Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit alliance of business leaders. "Merger and acquisition activity has stalled. . . . Portfolios have gone to hell. It's rippling all the way through our system."
In true New York fashion, more and more of those directly affected by the financial crisis are finding their way to psychoanalysts' couches.
"I had a whole bunch of referrals - I had five new patients just come in," said Alden Cass, a psychologist who specializes in mental health of stockbrokers and investment bankers. "These are individuals who have become successful at taking control of things, and now they are reduced to a kind of helplessness."
Cass spoke last week at a conference of mental health professionals in Santa Monica, Calif., explaining how they should handle an expected influx of new clients. When he returned to New York, he had 10 consecutive hours of patient sessions on his schedule.
The average working stiff might find it hard to sympathize with someone who once earned a couple of million in salary and bonuses suddenly being forced into a $180,000-a-year lifestyle. But according to Cass and others, the shock in New York is all too real. There are private-school tuitions, house staff salaries, and huge mortgages on multimillion-dollar apartments in Manhattan and second homes in the Hamptons.
