On Demand
City Business
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Kathryn Wylde, president & CEO of the Partnership for New York City, and Richmond McCoy, CEO of Urban America, discuss the fall-out of the Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch meltdowns and the effect on New York City.
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Welcome to the glorious era of deregulation.
psychology is the problem....its the fiat currency ma'am!
It's all about AIG. If AIG goes down it will be a disaster.
Obviously this is not good for those losing jobs, or the city itself. However, the financial practices that have led here have been shedding manufacturing jobs for years, doling out visas to erode the research base in the country, and driven house pricing (esp in NY metro) to levels where they are only affordable with the bizarre "products" that generated profits for the finance industry. Perhaps it is time Wall Street felt Main Strees's pain?
Wow...this is like a giant pep talk show...this actually is a WORLD crisis....not a 10 square block area of "the greatest city on earth (tm) (c)"
Presumably Kathryn Wilde knows that hedge funds have been suffering (if Greenspan hadn't bailed out Long Term Capital Management, we probably wouldn't be talking about hedge funds at all).
If education is going to be the savior, we have a problem. New York has quite low funding per capita for education (particularly compared to neighboring regions).
What is telling at the moment is that the public is being told to stay calm -- by EXACTLY those people who are currently selling off.
Brian,
Can you ask the guest how the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is affecting and will possibly affect commercial real estate development in NYC mainly Manhattan and Queens?
I feel sorry for the workers losing their jobs. I can't imagine going from $800K income to $50K. It is almost better to never had had the money than to have it all and lose it.
Money doesn't make you happy. It helps but there has to be inner happiness.
My heart goes out to those losing their jobs.
greed...yup thats usually the culprit
I agree with you O (#8), however on $800k/year you have time to accumulate and prepare for the bad times. On $50k you do not.
This reminds me of the dotcom bust in the Bay Area about 5 years ago. I was out there then and everyone was getting laid off. This whole banking bust makes me emotional because I lived through something similar.
I got laid off after seven rounds of layoffs at iVillage.com. Once I was laid off, it was impossible to find work in my feild again. Many people changed careers. I did not. Financially speaking, it was the hardest time of my life.
Today, I am happily employed in my field. It took a couple of years but things leveled out for internet companies. I wish you all the fortitude needed to endure this hard time.
N.I.N.A. !!! No Income No Asset Loan. What is that? Is that sound economics? I think not. Trickle down is a complete farce. We all benefited? OK. I'll try and remember that.
I don't think MBAs should switch degrees (although, maybe they should learn something about agriculture or manufacturing, instead of just finance). The MBA is a set of powerful tools applied to anything from non-profit work to any kind of operations. (Full disclosure: I teach Digital Marketing in the MBA program at Baruch, my MBA alma-matter.)
It's a common misperception that MBA = finance. Not true.
good job Brian...a guy calls up with negative stuff and you shut him up...
The last time I heard Kathy Wylde blame everyone for their greed was the Internet bubble bursting. I reject her claim that it's "all our faults." Every year these so-called investor companies pay their employees billions of bonuses. I suspect few of them are suffering like the rest of us who are "to blame."
Remember Bush's "ownership society?"
In the real world home ownership isn't a right, it's an investment for those who have the means to support it.
As i sit looking out my window @ the condominium project that has remained unfinished for over two years, I can't help but feel deep, tar-like sorrow for the poor finance workers who aren't able to experience the coke-fueled-frat-boy-market-based-parties they had been promised by their other bro's at gamma-phi-whatever...those poor upset twenty somethings..with only unemployment and severance, really are the *real* victim of wall street.
They should've just kept it a vacant lot, everyone will always need parking..
won't they?
-simplistic mediocre overview.
Well said, Phoebe. I totally agree.
I think NYC wages need to come up to snuff too, we can't pay people $30k per year and expect them to live on that in NYC with these astronomical rents and the cost of living is outrageous. Lunch is $15.00. It could drive me nuts but I don't let it.
So now that the six figure incomes of wall street is going away who are going to buy all the $400,000 condos in Prospect Heights?
AWM...you just said what I was going to say...tho yours is more eloquent and less acidic than mine
I LOVE how the fed is pouring money into a problem that was caused in part by greed and lack of regulation...but when Katrina hits NOLA- all those 'black' people were just lazy welfare relying hacks who depend on the government for everything. Wonderful world we live in.
You can't give out money without oversight. Either government lend directly to low income potential homeowners and evaluate each application themselves or just not lend money out at all. It's too open for abuse to buy mortgages from banks encouraging them to lend to ppl that can't afford to repay the loans.
Great, maybe this colapse will help Harlem and the East Village return to the crime ridden slums we all loved. I hate working people fowling these once great neighborhoods. Atlantic Yards will will return to the glory of the past, rail yards.
Home "Ownership" is different than taking out a mortgage on a house you can't afford....
I think it was Tom Waites who said, "The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away." What is the point of enabling (many unqualified) low-income families to buy homes if one is only going to swipe it back later--not so incidentally wiping out their life savings AND their credit histories?
But Home prices have tripled since the 1960's.
Cheers to Bloomberg, for inviting corporate greed to NYC, luring out of towners to NYC with luxury housing and materialistic gains, pushing the poor out of neighborhoods to suit the rich, now all of these spoil arrogant wall street players can all return to their parents homes in the south and midwest, yip, yip hurray!!!
@ bill:
thee has to be a middle ground between vomiting trust funders carrying home their wii's and a david simon wet dreams.
no?
Why is the PHIL GRAMM-DEREGULATION-McCAIN connection not getting more attention? Is Obama scared to touch this? Is it somehow off-limits?
Bush and the various "equal rights" thugs were all for lenders making loans to minorities (including illegal aliens) so they could participate in the wonders of home ownership. Fannie had a program directly aimed at illegal aliens.
We can't afford these bullcrap "diversity" initiatives anymore.
The elimination of affirmative action and its twisted ilk could be one good thing to come out of this mess.
ON McCain and Phil Gramm. Gramm has been a deregulator and has sided with the banks investment bankd to prevent or eviserate regulations... PS: Remember Enron, WorldCom, this same anti-regulation attitude can be seen there too
The problem from Obama's perspective is that at any rally it's tough to get a cheer out of the litany of economic woe. It doesn't feel right, it rings sourly.
OH...I DID say we were headed for A HUGE DEPRESSION...
Check the blog here:
sos-newdeal.blogspot.com/2008/09/we-interrupt-dow-down-500-points-wall.html
The problem is we're not even 25% into the crisis.
when the CONSUMER debt that was turned into "CDO"'s finally CRASHES and becomes value-less
AND the # of bankruptcies goes up 30%
THEN the damned banking industry will discover that another 50-60% of the problem is ThEIR
creation of these darn
collateralized debt obligations that they RESOLD (and claimed that were insured)
to other banks.
The WHOLE thing is INTERCONNECTED.
and I've been telling folks (and being tagged as a fringe lunatic) for over 2 years now... but It's FINALLY starting to REALLY hit home now..
take note Nuuna and BL Producers. Perhaps finally reading my blog may become Derigeur to see what else I think may be helpful
Why is the big outcry. This is capitalism at work, let the market sort itself out they say. Well let them. The sad thing is yes people are loosing jobs but these very same people act rude and arrogant when they are making huge sums of money and flaunt it when they come to cafes/restaurants etc and treat the minions like me with disdain.
I would bet that Treasury Secy Paulson had a major role in letting Lehman go down. It wont be surprising to find out that Goldman Sachs had options on it going down and they will come out big on this. Oh here we go again with the conspiracy theories they will say. But is it possible yes.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. The reason this problem is so massive has nothing to do with affirmative action, that’s a lazy, partisan way of looking at it.
The banks, investment and commercial, encouraged and maintained a system where small “mortgage firms” offered mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, modified or omitted the income deficiencies of those who held the mortgages. These mortgages ended up mixed in with layered investment instruments. As these investment go bad and are exposed as worthless, the investment banks find themselves without the liquidity to afford to pay back the debt they accumulated in order to fund their expansion into these new investment realms, i.e. subprime mortgages.
To blame it all on “diversity initiatives” is bizarre, misguided and just plain silly.
I know exactly what I'm talking about.
Fannie encouraged billions in loans to minority members who could never hope to service traditional loans. It even partnered with various ethnic hucksters, including the racist, pro-illegal alien National Council of La Raza ("The Race"), to promote loans to illegals.
Fannie boasted of working with "community-based immigrant and refugee organizations to directly reach the immigrant community." Presumably this would include The Race.
The Community Reinvestment Act is an obscene piece of legislation that mandates that lenders provide loans to "traditionally underserved markets.” Fannie would do this by suggesting "primary income may be supplemented by income from family members who are on disability or work off the books." Illegal aliens, much?
Welcome to the Diversity Recession. Happy Mexican Independence Day!
I like the "Jesus was a Community Organizer,
Pontius Pilate was a Governor," t-shirt,
myself.
I'm not sure if it is already a t-shirt or a button or a bumper sticker, but how about:
"Give McCain a Medal of Honor.
Give Obama the Presidency.
Vote 2008."
The fact that you’d use a complex and widespread problem that involves so many different entities and participants across the financial spectrum of this country to beat people who don’t look like you over the head betrays the simplistic and biased nature of your argument. Have fun with your perspective, it’s limited at best and will have you missing the point for the rest of your life.
AWM, #39,
I can't believe you could answer that with a civil tongue. I wouldn't have been able to.
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