Rosecry

Interesting article… I guess a fat back account can be a substitute for love… NYP

The white marble bar of the Meatpacking District hot spot Bistro Bagatelle is littered with $500 Louis Vuitton knockoff clutches—fakes, but nice fakes. Hovering over them are the anxious blonde women (fakes, but nice fakes too) to whom the bags belong. These are Manhattan’s gold diggers—ladies of little means and big ambitions, who hope to use their looks to nab a rich man, better highlights and perhaps even a real Vuitton clutch. This bar is their mine. But in the middle of the worst financial crisis the city has faced since the Great Depression, there’s little gold in “them thar hills.”

The only thing missing on this Tuesday night in October is bankers. There are no scotches or whiskeys or hairy wrists wearing expensive watches resting on the bar. The few gents there are at Bagatelle are seated together, speaking in low, somber tones over plates of coquilles St. Jacques and bottles of Médoc. Three young Bulgarian women at the bar are getting restless. Sophie—23, blonde and a real estate broker—wears a cream cashmere sweater with a neckline that plunges like the Dow. Her friend Emilaya, 23, is a student at CUNY who resembles Scarlett Johansson. Their third friend, another beautiful Bulgarian, doesn’t speak English. It doesn’t matter. Three single Slavs, and still no one has approached them. Sophie sighs and sips her Pinot gris. “It’s getting harder and harder to find a good man,” she says. “Everyone is looking for handsome, rich and charming men but there are less and less of them to go around.” Since the financial markets started collapsing back in March, wealthy Prince Charmings, already an endangered species on the nightlife scene, have become almost completely extinct. The handsome ones aren’t charming, the charming ones aren’t handsome and many of the rich ones are now poor.

With a supply of supple honeys outstripping demand, men are now choosier and even more fickle than usual. Ted Morgan, co-author of How to Marry a Multi-Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating, says, “There is an increased sense of desperation among women about dating, and men can sense this.” Beggars, they figure, can’t be choosers. Stacey, a raven-haired IT engineer, is single but shouldn’t be. At any other time, in fact, she wouldn’t be. The 31-year-old, who boasts of dating a well-known reality star and a slew of high-net-worth individuals, is accustomed to dinners at Ono and Markt, Nicolas Feuillatte champagne by the jeroboam and—if indeed she did end the night in her own home—being chauffeured there in a hired Town Car. But, she says, those Sex and the City salad days are over. She complains, “It sucks to be a single girl right now”—in large part because strapped Wall Street guys are spending less on dates. A typical night out during these troubled times may still be at Buddakan, but it will just as likely be for wine at the bar rather than a table laden with $44 Peking duck. According to one 29-year-old trader who lives in Murray Hill, “We don’t have time or money to spend hundreds of dollars on a girl. If it’s a drink and it doesn’t go anywhere, well, at least I’m cutting back.”

Today, women drinking paid-for saketinis are among the lucky few. Staceys and Sophies all over the city—women who six months ago subsisted on a steady diet of underwritten dinners followed by a night of bottle service at Marquee or Rose Bar—are waiting for their Sidekicks to vibrate. Sophie is broken up about a recently pink-slipped relationship with a Lehman brother. “I was dating this guy for a couple of weeks,” she says, “and all of a sudden he just stopped calling me. For weeks, I waited. Finally he called. He had lost his job and was too ashamed to tell me.”

But all downturns have their upsides. Just as the Wall Street apocalypse has been a boon to short sellers—those who bet against the stock market—so too has the scarcity of marketable men been a boon to, well, men. In some ways, the slowdown has created space for true love to flourish. Win Hornig, 25, a former analyst for the now defunct Bear Stearns who pens the blog Banker Gone Broke, isn’t on the dating scene anymore. He met his girlfriend, a former Lehman Brothers analyst, through a mutual friend over a dinner at Country last month, when he still had a job but the market was cooling off. “If the market was busy, we would have never met. We both would have been at the office instead.” Win’s a winner, but today even losers can score. According to Ted, “You used to hear women say, ‘I’d never date anyone who makes less than $1 million.’ You don’t hear that anymore. The number is getting lower and lower and lower.” Stacey says now when she goes out on dates she asks herself, “Does this person have EP—earning potential? Even if he’s a janitor, I’d give him a chance.” But Stacey would do well to learn from the market. Trading in futures is risky business.