Crisis? Who Said Anything About a Crisis?

I love it...let's get rid of the soap to save some bucks.....do as I say, not as I do. The titans rule!!

By PETER EDMONSTON
New York Times
Published: April 2, 2008

THE subprime contagion seems to be everywhere on Wall Street — except in the real-estate spending habits of investment banking chiefs, hedge fund managers and private equity bosses.
While the mortgage markets have been convulsing, Wall Streeters have been completing one big-ticket deal after another, buying condos, co-ops and town houses at some of New York’s most prestigious addresses.

In January, Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, closed on a $26 million duplex at 15 Central Park West, one of Manhattan’s hottest new buildings. Scott A. Bommer, a hedge fund manager, bought a Fifth Avenue co-op for $46 million. And Edgar Bronfman Jr., part of a private equity consortium that owns the Warner Music Group, spent $19.5 million for his own Fifth Avenue co-op.

As the mortgage mess deepened, the deals rolled on. In February, Raymond C. Mikulich, until recently the head of the real estate private equity group at Lehman Brothers, paid $17.9 million for a four-bedroom apartment at 15 Central Park West. Then Philip A. Falcone, a senior managing director at Harbinger Capital Partners, a hedge fund, closed on a deal to buy the Upper East Side mansion that once belonged to Robert C. Guccione, founder of Penthouse magazine, for $49 million.

James E. Cayne’s $28 million purchase of two units in the Plaza was not the biggest deal, but it was among the most awkwardly timed. A few weeks after the second deal closed, the Wall Street firm where he is chairman, Bear Stearns, collapsed.