The Market Bounceback: When Stocks Shimmy, New York Shakes
Corrections & Amplifications</br></br>A STOCKBROKER quoted in a Marketplace page article Wednesday on New York City's reaction to this week's stock-market gyrations was misidentified as Ray Itel. His name is Ray Idec. (WSJ Oct. 31, 1997)</br></br>NEW YORK -- On Monday, as the stock market plunged, a media-industry analyst who had been on the prowl for a $900,000, six-room Manhattan co-op apartment got cold feet. "On Monday afternoon he called back and said that he and his wife had definitely changed their minds," recalls real-estate broker Barbara Corcoran of Manhattan's Corcoran Group. "They're now looking for a smaller apartment, under $500,000."</br></br>Here in the world's biggest financial center, the week's extraordinary market activity sent ripples everywhere -- from cigar bars to penthouse apartments to Madison Avenue boutiques to the hushed sanctums of the New York Public Library. The lesson, palpable everywhere: Much of the city's prosperity is directly linked to Wall Street wealth that can disappear and reappear in a flash.</br></br>Although the securities and commodities industries account for only 5% of the city's private-sector employment, they pump out a whopping 18% of private-sector payroll -- $23 billion last year, says John Wieting, regional commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's up from 13%, and $11 billion, at the time of the 1987 crash.