Panel: Wall St. Fallout Less Than Prior Downturn

NEW YORK CITY-”It’s not like the savings and loan crisis that was somewhere else,” said John Powers, chairman of the New York tri-state region for CB Richard Ellis. “This one is very close to home.”

Powers, speaking Friday at a luncheon sponsored by CoreNet Global’s New York chapter, was referring to the financial services upheaval that began earlier this month with the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and intensified last weekend with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the bailout of AIG. He said Wall Street hasn’t seen anything like it since the Great Depression. In fact, the crisis gathered momentum so rapidly that fellow panelist Marisa Di Natale said she waited until the last minute to put her presentation together, “because things are changing so rapidly.”

However, even with these recent developments, Di Natale, senior economist with Moody’s Economy.com, said the downturn nationally would be less dramatic than the recessions of 1990 and 2000-2001, although she would now give the New York region a 25% chance of suffering a “severe” recession. With that said, Di Natale predicted that the loss of 100,000 office-using jobs in the New York region that will occur by the trough of the current downturn will be considerably less than the drop-off of 150,000 jobs seen in the previous recession. Accordingly, Powers said the effects on New York’s commercial real estate, while considerable, would not reach the depths of previous troughs.