Back in Saky, Semenov predicted a far darker future: a dead tourism industry, empty beaches, and a return to the volatile and lawless early nineteen-nineties.
A particular chill has seeped into the plastic surgery industry, emptying waiting rooms and driving clinics out of business.
Many people in real estate worry that the subprime mortgage debacle could lead to sizable layoffs in the financial services industry, emptying a lot of office space in Manhattan and causing rents to fall.
THE setting is far from elaborate: two modest houses on a street of light industry and empty buildings here, the rooms neat but in need of paint, cracks revealed by bleak florescent lighting.
Detroit, once the motor of America's car industry, feels emptied out, and so it is.
In some of the worst excesses of the industry lenders emptied people's bank accounts on payday so that they were forced to take out a new expensive loan just to be able to pay their bills or eat.
Even in Orange County, Calif., where a shrinking mortgage industry has emptied hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space, asking rents in newly sold buildings have risen disproportionately.
"People have no idea what's going on in Hollywood now," a prominent industry blogger told me recently when we met at what had been a favorite industry watering hole, empty that night.
"Its once great industries and industrial cities have emptied out".
It explained that, since the collapse of communism and end of the cold war, the order books of the arms industry had been empty.
But Retrofit believes that small measures are the route to success in this game: another dose of realism in an industry full of empty promises.
