Bailed-Out Wall Street "Gives Thanks" w Lavish Spending

Nov. 25, 2010 - PRLog -- This must be what they mean by "trickle down" economics.
Two years after the onset of the financial crisis,
Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again.
And this means they are spending again — at times cautiously, but sometimes with a familiar swagger.
When it comes to personal indulgences, the wallets are beginning to open up.
Traders and executives say that jobs seem much more secure.
Businesses whose fortunes ebb and flow with the financial markets are thriving again.
“Wall Street is back spending as much if not more than before,”
said the New York dermatologic surgeon Dr. Francesca J. Fusco,
whose business is booming again after a difficult few years.
Christie’s auction house says investors from the financial world who fell out of the bidding market during the 2008 credit crisis are “pouring” back in.
Expensive restaurants report a pickup in bookings.
At the Porter House restaurant in the Time Warner Center across from Central Park --
a favorite of A-list Wall Street executives, including Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein --
the head chef, Michael Lomonaco, says business is up about 10 percent over a year ago and
“people are starting to shake off what happened.”
Bookings for private rooms have increased.
“At some point, firms want to reward their people, and they seem more willing to do so this year,” he said.
Real estate agents say Wall Street executives have already begun lining up rentals in the Hamptons for next summer.
Dolly Lenz of Prudential Douglas Elliman said the bidding this year was “hotter and heavier” than previous years.
“There is a passion now in the market I haven’t seen in a while,” she said.
She said her clients, almost exclusively from Wall Street, were afraid to lose out.
Just recently, Ms. Lenz said, she had three people bidding more than $400,000 for a summer rental in Southampton.
“The mood is absolutely better, much better than even a year ago,”
said David M. Gildea, a health care trader at the Wall Street firm Cowen & Company.
Mr. Gildea was a trader at Bear Stearns before it was sold to JPMorgan Chase at a fire-sale price.
He then moved to another big firm, which went through a similar near-death experience.
In 2008, even on a good trading day, he said, he and other traders were reluctant to even go out for a drink after work,
uncertain if they were going to keep their jobs.
Now, Mr. Gildea said, people are stepping out more,
and firms like Cowen are more optimistic about the future.
“Are we back to where we were? Absolutely not,” he said.
“Many people in our industry have learned to live more responsibly,
but there is a definite buzz on the Street that hasn’t been there in some time.”
Indeed.
Exuberance was definitely in evidence at Josh Koplewicz’s annual Halloween party.

More than 1,000 people packed into a 6,000-square-foot space at the Good Units night club in Manhattan,

a substantially larger crowd than in the last several years.
The open bar was sponsored by Russian Standard vodka,
and Mr. Koplewicz, an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs, was able to snag a big headliner:
the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim, who performed dressed in a black cat costume.
The scene was still more extravagant in September,
at a 50th birthday party in Hong Kong for Brian Brille, the head of Bank of America Asia Pacific.
Mr. Brille, who is well known on the New York social scene, wore a gray Hugh Hefner-esque jacket.
Women dressed like Playmates, with feather boas and satin ears, danced behind a pink silk screen.
J.T. Cacciabaudo, head of equity trading and sales trading at the regional brokerage firm Sterne Agee, says
while there is some concern in the market about the fourth quarter and how it will end,
optimism about the longer term “has come back” and firms like his are in growth mode.
“Going into the third quarter, there was chatter about layoffs and most of that didn’t come to fruition
because firms seem more optimistic about 2011 than the past two years,” he said.
This despite the fact that bonuses on Wall Street are not...

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