Catching up on this week's New York.
There's James Cramer's column:
What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful.
And an interview with financial historian Niall Ferguson:
I’m in Venice now, which used to be a financial center and is now a tourist center. And the nightmare is that a crisis of this magnitude will turn New York from a financial center into a tourist center. The good news is that London seems to be handling this crisis slightly worse than New York. My sense is that the great financial crisis we’re living through will fundamentally tilt the balance of the world from West to East. Sovereign-wealth funds will matter much, much more because they’ve got the money and we haven’t. New York isn’t quite Venice yet, but I certainly am quite relieved that I don’t own a large block of real estate in Manhattan right now.
And there's a piece on that newish place on 7th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue that sells fancy sliced hog:
It fills the shop with a lovely aroma that wafts its way down the block, causing startled passersby to lift their noses and sniff the air like cartoon hoboes on the trail of a windowsill pie. Resistance is futile.
Unless you're a vegetarian.
My nightmare is that the job losses on Wall Street turn out to have no effect on New York, since the city has basically turned into a place for the super rich to go and live, not as a place to have careers. That is what Venice turned into during the 18th century. Then the city will be culturally dead, with no recovery, and it will still be unaffordable.
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