Missing: familiar voices at a trillion dollar firm

By ROSS FINLEY

NEW YORK - For shellshocked US bond market participants who filed in for their first day of work since the attack on the World Trade Center yesterday it was mostly a day of grief.

Shockwaves from the disaster that shook lower Manhattan to its foundations still resonated across the nation as the fixed-income markets cautiously reopened for business.

A tightly knit group of market professionals shrugged off worries about the economy and instead grieved for those already gone or feared dead.

"Forget the six degrees of separation. Everybody in this business is probably going to know someone who got killed," said Steven Wood, chief economist at FinancialOxygen, a financial services firm in Walnut Creek, California.

"And if you associated with Cantor in any particular way, you're just going to know loads of people."

Leading US interdealer-broker Cantor-Fitzgerald, which handled a quarter of the $US3 trillion ($7 trillion) US Government securities market, occupied floors 101 to 105 of 1 World Trade Center, the first building that was struck by a hijacked passenger jet and the second to collapse into a pile of dust and rubble.

Cantor said some 700 of its 1000 staff in the building are unaccounted for and published a list of those missing and feared dead.

Howard Lutnick, the company's chief executive, did not make it to work on Wednesday because he took his son to his first day of kindergarten. But many others were not so lucky.

Traders and investors across America who dealt with the firm - and the many others that were in the World Trade Center - reeled from the losses yesterday. Many were too upset to talk, or just could not find words to express their grief.

"I probably know a couple of hundred people at Cantor and they're probably dead," said a Government bond trader at a US primary dealer in New York. "It's just so devastating.

"I don't think people have really felt the effect right now."

Some had close ties, like Craig Smith, a portfolio manager at Loomis Sayles in Chicago, who said he lost a close friend who worked in the towers.

"All the assumptions are that he didn't make it. It's been very, very difficult."

On a normal day, bond investors focus on the onslaught of economic data, like yesterday's reports showing soaring jobless claims and plunging consumer confidence. But they were insignificant compared with this week's human loss.

"Inevitably you drift back to talk about friends and their companies. It's hard to be focused," said Richard Schlanger, a bond portfolio manager in Boston.

- REUTERS

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