Cad Futures Bright For 2009

Many of New York’s small manufacturers are well positioned to ride out the recession:

Some businesses are making products that government agencies and companies are still buying, like body armor for soldiers in Iraq and sets for television programs like “Saturday Night Live.” They also make food products like tortillas for local immigrant communities and baguettes for Manhattan restaurants. Others make luxury goods, like high-end audio speakers, that affluent customers are still buying.

“There’s quite a market for niche products in New York City,” said Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan research group in Manhattan, and an author of several manufacturing studies. “For a lot of the niche manufacturers, including those that are broadly appealing to the high-end market, they may be doing O.K.”

And there are even areas of the service sector that are still going strong:

We’re having lunch in a swanky Midtown steakhouse, both furtively looking around to ensure we’re not recognized by anyone we know.

Well, he’s looking around. I’m only pretending to be married, to want to be a mistress, to live on the Upper West Side, and to be a jewelry designer on an innocuously named infidelity Web site, AshleyMadison.com –with the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair” — where my posting elicited 544 e-mail come-ons in six days.

So, this is what the men who built this city are doing as it’s brought to its knees by a sinking economy.

“Look, marriage is like a corporation,” Brad, a 43-year-old attorney, tells me. “You have a budget, you have employees, and you have a business plan to keep it running smoothly. Sometimes you have to subcontract out the romance.

“I think you probably need a friend like me,” he says, kissing my hand.

. . .

As almost every economic indicator in America began to point downward, the 6-year-old Web site was enjoying its two best recruiting months ever –221,000 new members signed on in October and 262,000 in November — according to happily married and allegedly monogamous Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.

Men pay $49.99 for a basic package with 100 credits that can be used to start online conversations with willing women.

The women join for free and, Biderman says, are mostly bored housewives who haven’t been touched in years or single women looking for sugar daddies and women in new marriages without any children.

“We believe we save more marriages than we end,” Biderman says.

Then again, maybe it’s no wonder:

As unemployment has hit a 16-year high and Wall Street shakes off tens of thousands of jobs, affluent couples in the New York area find their families suddenly in flux. It’s not only the high-flying income and the attendant abundance that have evaporated. For many couples, it’s also the assumption of what their marriages would look like; the traditional model — executive husband and stay-at-home wife — may be a little dated, or unworkable.

One mother in TriBeCa, who is married, at least for now, to a Wall Street executive, put it rather bluntly: “My job was to run the household and the children’s lives, she said. “his job is to provide us with a nice lifestyle.” But his bonus has disappeared, and his annual pay has dropped to $150,000 from $800,000 a year. “Let me just say this,” she said, “I’m still doing my job.”

. . .

Amy Reiss, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, said that she had seen a spate of women seeking to end their marriages after they re-entered the work force or expanded their careers to replace their husbands’ income. The wives don’t resent working, she said. In fact, they’re pleased to contribute.

But “the husbands become what I call ‘clickers,'” Ms. Reiss said. “These are unemployed men who sit on the couch all day, holding the remote and watching TV, unable to step up and take over some of the household tasks and chores associated with raising the kids.”

Those women, she said, come to her looking for an exit strategy.

Fuzzy Wuzzy Forced To Budget More Time For Theatrics

The MTA already pulled the save-the-school-band card. Now everyone else wants to make sure the animals aren’t furloughed:

In yesterday’s State of the State address, Governor Paterson described New York’s economic situation as “perilous.” His proposed budget for the 2009–10 fiscal year poses huge cuts across the board — no sector is safe, from the Department of Education to the MTA. But one of the largest cuts comes at the expense of treasured cultural institutions: the city’s zoos, parks and aquariums, which face a possible 55 percent cut in their funding — and a total elimination of funding in 2010.

Sounds Like The Greatest Job Ever!

What happens when the boss is under house arrest:

Every day, dozens of employees of swindler Bernard Madoff’s firm report to their Midtown offices. They’re still paid — but they do no work.

The phones at Madoff Securities are turned off. The few computers that remain aren’t plugged in.

“It’s pretty bad,” one employee said. “We can’t conduct any business. We basically get there at 9, hang around, and go home at 5. It’s surreal. It’s also scary, because we don’t know what’s going on.

“We’re basically just sitting around and waiting for the call that dismisses us,” he said.

If You Think Your PCP Is A Big Enough Nag Already . . .

. . . just wait until he or she is eligible to receive performance bonuses from the Department of Health:

And echoing the city’s cash-incentive experiments in the school system, the health department will soon start offering doctors bonuses of perhaps $100 for each patient who hits specified targets like controlling blood pressure or cholesterol, up to $20,000 for each doctor.

And then they’ll really start pimping out those statin drugs!

The Economy Stays Cool, This Is A Robbery

You don’t need a YouTube stunt to see that the economy is bad and getting worse:

In what may be the latest sign of the harsh economic times, five banks in four boroughs were robbed on Monday, four of them within an hour and a half.

But if the robberies, in their frequency and timing, were startling, so too was their brazenness. Most of them occurred in heavily trafficked areas in broad daylight, including one that took place steps away from Lincoln Center in the middle of the afternoon.

Bank robberies in the city are up by 54 percent this year, the Police Department said, to 431 as of Monday afternoon, from 280 at this time last year. Robbery statistics over the past 20 years suggest that the robberies may have been fueled in part by the financial desperation that sets in during a recession and the added pressures of the holiday season.

The authorities took notice in early September, when the number of bank robberies for the year reached 268, compared with 183 during the same period in 2007.

. . .

“It’s well documented that during a recession, bank robberies go up,” [Michelle Renee, a former banking industry executive who tracks bank robbery trends] said. “But also, this time of the year is the busiest time for bank robberies. So you combine those two together and it becomes a dangerous time for bank employees.”