Recessions bring out the best in people. Or so said a money manager I saw last week for lunch in midtown Manhattan. All that bull-market braggadocio gets ditched. Courtesy makes a comeback. No more boasting about properties, alpha or which school your child goes to. Just as reality returns to investing, so it return to people's sense of what matters in life.

That may be cold comfort to some, but for everyone who has trailed in the wake of the financial community these past few years, it is really great news. It's also terrific for the handful armed with cash.

Friends of John Paulson, the reigning champ of New York's money managers after his epic short of subprime mortgages last year, tell me the man is agog at the buying opportunities. Everything is for sale. Want an Upper East Side townhouse? Yours. Yahoo? Yours again. Mega-yacht? Buy one, get one free.

Paulson is in for another bumper year, with several of his funds up between 15% and 25% through November. His small firm, just 70 people or so managing some £24 billion, is now rumoured to be combing through the wreckage of the mortgage industry and buying up good debt at knockdown prices.

But does this constitute a bottom in the American recession? Far from it. Paulson tells Bloomberg that he sees continued “deterioration in almost every asset class”.

He's experiencing it himself as he tries to unload his old beach house in the Hamptons. In January, he upgraded to a £27 million home and put his old place up for £13 million. It's now listed at £9 million and still looking for a buyer.

* When developers bought New York's Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Central Park, promising to turn it into the fanciest private address in town, buyers lined up. Russian billionaires and bankers, like Bear Stearns' ex-CEO Jimmy Cayne, pre-paid for flats.

Now the building is ready and buyers are alleging that the cheapskate developers skimped on materials. Lawsuits are flying. Humble renters in this market are feeling very smug indeed.

* Advertisers are having to get more creative as consumers snap shut their wallets. In Chicago, commuters shivering in the city's bus stops are feeling blasts of warm air, courtesy of Stove Top, a popular brand of instant meat side-dish.
The idea is that they associate the pleasant warmth with the stuffing and head for the supermarket. The accompanying poster reads: “Cold, provided by winter. Warmth, provided by Stove Top.” But doesn't this all smack a little too much of the 1930s?