Cad Futures Bright For 2009

Many of New York’s small manufacturers are well positioned to ride out the recession:

Some businesses are making products that government agencies and companies are still buying, like body armor for soldiers in Iraq and sets for television programs like “Saturday Night Live.” They also make food products like tortillas for local immigrant communities and baguettes for Manhattan restaurants. Others make luxury goods, like high-end audio speakers, that affluent customers are still buying.

“There’s quite a market for niche products in New York City,” said Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan research group in Manhattan, and an author of several manufacturing studies. “For a lot of the niche manufacturers, including those that are broadly appealing to the high-end market, they may be doing O.K.”

And there are even areas of the service sector that are still going strong:

We’re having lunch in a swanky Midtown steakhouse, both furtively looking around to ensure we’re not recognized by anyone we know.

Well, he’s looking around. I’m only pretending to be married, to want to be a mistress, to live on the Upper West Side, and to be a jewelry designer on an innocuously named infidelity Web site, AshleyMadison.com –with the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair” — where my posting elicited 544 e-mail come-ons in six days.

So, this is what the men who built this city are doing as it’s brought to its knees by a sinking economy.

“Look, marriage is like a corporation,” Brad, a 43-year-old attorney, tells me. “You have a budget, you have employees, and you have a business plan to keep it running smoothly. Sometimes you have to subcontract out the romance.

“I think you probably need a friend like me,” he says, kissing my hand.

. . .

As almost every economic indicator in America began to point downward, the 6-year-old Web site was enjoying its two best recruiting months ever –221,000 new members signed on in October and 262,000 in November — according to happily married and allegedly monogamous Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.

Men pay $49.99 for a basic package with 100 credits that can be used to start online conversations with willing women.

The women join for free and, Biderman says, are mostly bored housewives who haven’t been touched in years or single women looking for sugar daddies and women in new marriages without any children.

“We believe we save more marriages than we end,” Biderman says.

Then again, maybe it’s no wonder:

As unemployment has hit a 16-year high and Wall Street shakes off tens of thousands of jobs, affluent couples in the New York area find their families suddenly in flux. It’s not only the high-flying income and the attendant abundance that have evaporated. For many couples, it’s also the assumption of what their marriages would look like; the traditional model — executive husband and stay-at-home wife — may be a little dated, or unworkable.

One mother in TriBeCa, who is married, at least for now, to a Wall Street executive, put it rather bluntly: “My job was to run the household and the children’s lives, she said. “his job is to provide us with a nice lifestyle.” But his bonus has disappeared, and his annual pay has dropped to $150,000 from $800,000 a year. “Let me just say this,” she said, “I’m still doing my job.”

. . .

Amy Reiss, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, said that she had seen a spate of women seeking to end their marriages after they re-entered the work force or expanded their careers to replace their husbands’ income. The wives don’t resent working, she said. In fact, they’re pleased to contribute.

But “the husbands become what I call ‘clickers,'” Ms. Reiss said. “These are unemployed men who sit on the couch all day, holding the remote and watching TV, unable to step up and take over some of the household tasks and chores associated with raising the kids.”

Those women, she said, come to her looking for an exit strategy.