Nearly 5,000 miles from Wall Street, Dmitry Zhiltsov’s recruiting agency is bleeding clients as investment banks that once hunted Russia’s financial wizards succumb to the U.S. meltdown.
Flipping on the morning news, he wonders: Who will fall today? He watches the real estate market too. If housing prices dive in his hometown of St. Petersburg, and his business dries up and banks limit lending, who will pay his $3,000 monthly mortgage?
“It’s like I’m . . . waiting for the collapse,” he said by telephone from his kitchen, a few blocks from the Baltic Sea.
Transactions gone sour in a compact corner of Manhattan have triggered a historic government rescue plan for the world’s biggest economy and poisoned global finance, disrupting markets that trade everything from sugar to credit.
Many ordinary people from Algiers to New Delhi have watched Wall Street degenerate on TV as if it were a gruesome spectator sport. But it is also taking a toll on lives less clearly linked to what’s gone wrong.
Hong Kong homemaker Elaine Law’s world is swooning too. She’s had a hard time eating and sleeping lately and says she even contemplated suicide out of fears about the fate of her family’s $70,800 savings in a financial instrument linked to Lehman Brothers.
“We were very confident about the market. Who would have thought . . . big bank like Lehman would collapse?” asked Law, 59.
Jobs too are falling prey to the U.S. financial crisis, as far away as the central Philippine city of Cebu.
Michael Basubas’ furniture export company in Cebu, which depends mainly on U.S. customers, has slashed his 200-strong workforce to 80 since last year.
He said exporters are banking on a change in the U.S. administration to perk up demands for their products but expect that “from now until mid-next year, it will really be tough times.”
