No more sushi for the one-time big spenders

Peter Stavropoulos remembers going to the trendy Morimoto sushi restaurant in Manhattan's West Village with 16 friends. They spent $3,200 on food alone and then went to the Buddha Bar, where "bottle service" starts at $250 for a Veuve Clicquot Brut Rosé 2000 champagne. And they had to wait for a table. That was then, when the average Wall Street salary was $400,000 a year.

Today, Stavropoulos, a former hedge-fund strategist, is one of the 255,441 Americans who have lost top-paying jobs in the finance industry since January 2008. In New York alone, bonuses paid to bankers fell to $18.4 billion last year from $32.9 billion in 2007. What might sound like good news for anti-capitalists is very bad news for almost everyone else, because for every job lost in finance, 3.3 will vanish in other industries.

Stavropoulos, whose father made dresses for Maria Callas, has stopped buying a daily Venti Black Iced Tea from Starbucks, which said in January that it will cut 6,700 jobs. "I used to take $300 for the week; that was walking-around money," Stavropoulos told Bloomberg. "Now I take $100 for the week. Forget about ordering sushi for lunch."