These may be austere, depressing times for New York's private sector. But for our public officials, it's a full-blown boom. Hence the spectacle—in a week in which the mayor and the governor presented end-of-days budgets—of David Paterson fretting about the perils of coming into massive amounts of cash. "Certainly in terms of the stimulus money, we ...

We learned that: The city will owe a lot of money to service its debt, Bill Thompson says. Apartment vacancy rates to rise but roommates may save some nabes. Hedge funder bought Kitty Carlisle Hart's old 1185 Park penthouse for $19 million. Hamptons home sales plunged over 41 percent annually in 4Q 2008. The North Fork experienced a sharp ...