As Wall Street Burns, Smokers Light Up

On the day the Dow plunged almost 800 points, Erick Giliberti was doubling down on his smoking habit.

Before the turmoil, says Giliberti, a manager at Deloitte who works with mortgage-backed securities, "I was maybe a pack a week." Now? "Probably double that...I can't stare at my computer screen anymore and watch the market collapse in front of me—I just want to get away from it."

Giliberti was standing outside the Deloitte offices at the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan, furiously thumbing his BlackBerry with one hand and holding a Marlboro Light with the other. He is, he says, "32 going on 55."

From the Financial Center to Wall Street itself to the shell-shocked (former) Lehman Brothers building in midtown Manhattan, it's easy to find stressed-out financial workers sucking on cigarettes, and most will tell you they're lighting up more often. Nobody is thinking of quitting.

A Lehman Brothers employee who, for now, has kept his job with new owner Barclays, is smoking "20, 30% more," in part because "we don’t really have much work to do these days, so we just sit around and talk to people."

Nearby, a woman named Liz, who has been let go from Lehman along with her boss, says that stress at the company in the past six months led her to start smoking for the first time in her life—at the age of 61.

"Everybody could tell that Lehman was falling apart the end of last year," she says. "I was under a tremendous amount of pressure, so I picked up a cigarette." It didn’t help matters that she lived with her daughter and her daughter’s fiancé, both of whom smoke.