New Year Opens With More Pink Slips in Silicon Alley and Stock Market Anxiety

NEW YORK CITY-The new year was rung in joyously in Times Square, which has itself continued its rebirth of the last couple of years and continues to see new development and significant pre-leasing. The scene wasn’t quite the same throughout the city though as Silicon Alley continued printing up pink slips. Already on the first day of trading in 2001 the Nasdaq was down another 178.66 points.

The Nasdaq had been dragged down, as has the stock market and the Dow Jones, throughout the fourth quarter of 2000 by anxiety over the carnage in the technology sector. As layoffs in the dot-com world began to become almost cliché, faith in the ability of much of the sector to survive became shaky at best. Concern over the real estate market’s ability in the future to soak the vacancies mass layoffs will create has also begun to surface.

Traditional bricks and mortar businesses are currently enjoying tremendous expansion of space, making most dot-com vacancies seem almost inconsequential as the space is quickly grabbed. If all sectors of the economy are forced to confront a true recession as some are now fearing, however, the rate at which companies will take over vacated dotcom space may slow significantly as the rate at which they fold accelerates.