As real estate prices in the city, or at least in Manhattan, approach pre-Lehman levels, and the wider economy teeters back from the brink, the guys who built the apartments are still suffering. According to a quarterly report from the New York Building Congress, employment for construction workers fell to its lowest level Read More
Ever since the credit crisis hit and the real estate market collapsed, the news has been filled with disgraced developers–including in these very pages. Yet for every plucked chicken, there seems to be an equal number of phoenixes who, year after year, decade after decade, return from the construction graveyard to build again. (The Observer, Read More
There are dueling articles in the Journal and Times about Walmart’s renwed interest in New York. Not to brag, but both sound a lot like an item we wrote back in September, about how the world’s largest retailer and nation’s largest employer would use the same tactics that recently succeeded Read More
Developer and skyscraper collector Aby Rosen is known for his flare. The 81st most powerful man in local real estate is a connoisseur whose buildings are practically an extension of his extensive art collection — for every Warhol, Hering and Hirst, there is a Seagrams Building, a Lever House, a 40 Bond. He’s Read More
The National Bureau of Economic Research said today that our economy bottomed out in the June of last year. The 9.6 percent of Americans who are unemployed, the average household whose wealth dropped 2.8 percent in the second quarter and the 3.8 million who fell into poverty in 2009 Read More
Thanks to increased public scrutiny in the era of bailouts, SEC investigations and other forms of government inquiry, newcomers to Wall Street’s top firms aren’t getting the classy treatment they used to, according to this Businessweek trend piece on the death of “sell night.”
On sell nights of yore, investment banks would wine Read More
• Talk of a double-dip recession is overblown, says one economist, for the simple reason that our beaten-up economy is close to rock bottom. [Bloomberg]
• The European Central Bank will probably continue to prop up basket-case banks in Ireland, Spain and Greece until early 2011. [Reuters]
• At the top Read More
Americans felt slightly better about the economy in August than they did in July. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose to 53.5 for August from a revised July figure of 51. Per Briefing.com, analysts had expected the index to ring in at 50.5.
Despite the incremental improvement, the index is still Read More
New York, superior to the nation as a whole in nearly all respects, can add one more category in which it dominates: The Great Recession hurts in the Empire City, but New Yorkers are far less scarred by our nation’s economic woes than the average American.
Thanks to real estate prices that have failed to fall apace Read More
A stagnant economy may rank right up there with bad breath, ugly shoes and emotional neediness among the things that prevent people from reproducing. According to a Centers for Disease Control study reported by the Associated Press, the number of births shrank 2.7 percent in 2009, despite an increase in the population.
The CDC contemplated the idea that Read More
