How the Super-Rich Are Surviving the Meltdown | Newsweek Business

Get Famous! Right Now! Do It Online!
Jessica Bennett 8/12/2009 12:00:00 AM
Andrew Mahon needed to get famous—fast. So he set up a Web site—famousandrew.com—asked people to give him suggestions, and acted out their fancy on YouTube. He videotaped himself getting his bellybutton pierced, dressed as a Wall Street banker begging for change—even rode his bike around Manhattan in nothing but an American-flag thong.
BOOKS
Terror on the Streets of New York, Take One
David Wallace-Wells 2/7/2009 12:00:00 AM
One September morning in 1920, a horse-drawn wagon made its way along Wall Street in lower Manhattan, came to a stop in front of the J.P. Morgan building and exploded. The wagon, which has been called the world's first car bomb and was likely delivered by an Italian anarchist named Mario Buda, had been loaded with 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of cast-iron slugs. It was detonated, for maximum effect, at the start of the noon lunch hour at the busiest corner in New York's financial district; the explosion killed 39, wounded hundreds more and remained, until the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst terrorist attack in American history. You can still see the pockmarks made by the bomb in the building's façade, but, as Beverly Gage reminds us in "The Day Wall Street Exploded," the episode, and the age of terrorism that spawned it, has more or less disappeared from our national memory. The Morgan building doesn't even have a commemorative plaque.
BUSINESS
Vice: The Recession-Proof Bet
Eve Conant 10/25/2008 12:00:00 AM
It's 8:30 p.m., the stock market is down 700 points, and Rick's Cabaret in Manhattan is packed. Drinks are flowing, women in electric-blue gowns are peeling off layers onstage, and if the Wall Street clientele is stressed, the guys aren't pinching pennies. Sabrina, who offers $20 neck rubs at the bar, is making a killing. "I'm happy," she says, "but I'm sorry it's for this reason." Margo, a stripper, tells NEWSWEEK she just wired $1,000 to her dad, a plumber who recently got sacked. Claudia, another dancer, says her tips are "consistent," but she's losing clients in her day job as a fitness trainer. This stability isn't news to Rick's CEO, Eric Langen, who has seen stock in his chain of gentlemen's clubs nose-dive even as his revenues nearly double. "I wouldn't say we're recession-proof," he says, "but we're recession-resistant."
INNOVATION
Capitalists of the Prairie
Daniel Gross 9/12/2008 12:00:00 AM
It's 9:30 in the morning and the playgrounds of U.S. capitalism are open for business. On the bustling floor of the NYSE in lower Manhattan, brokers call out orders as CNBC anchors Erin Burnett and Mark Haines try to put a brave face on the latest industrial-production numbers. A few miles uptown, in Times Square, the NASDAQ market electronic bell signals the beginning of trading. And in an upscale suburban strip mall outside Kansas City, Mo.—near Latte Land and the Land of Paws pet boutique—business is just getting underway at BATS, America's third largest stock exchange.
It’s a Wonderful Life (In Jersey)
Daniel Gross 8/2/2008 12:00:00 AM
"If you look to the right, you can see New York City," says Ronald Hermance Jr., CEO of Hudson City Bancorp, AS he points out the fourth-floor window of the company's boxy headquarters in unglamorous Paramus, N.J. I had to venture through traffic to this distinctly non-imperial corporate redoubt 11 miles west of the George Washington Bridge—it's just past a union building and across the street from a garden-supply center—in my quest to find a sensible banker in the New York area. (Given the ongoing credit meltdown, I now know how Abraham felt when he was searching for a righteous man in Sodom.)
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