Ashley Seitz faces the possibility of getting her MBA from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and walking straight into a recession.
The corporate finance major says it could be worse.
"At least I'm not going into banking," said Seitz, 25, of Shadyside.
Seitz, who will graduate in the spring, said she was encouraged Wednesday night by a panel of economists who explained the crisis on Wall Street to about 200 Tepper School alumni and students at The Rivers Club, Downtown.
They used "plain English," she said, stripping at least some of the mystery and fear surrounding the deepening recession.
"This is not like the Great Depression," said Allan Meltzer, the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
"It's probably going to be a garden-variety recession, with unemployment going up to around 8 percent," which would be about 2 percentage points higher than it is now, Meltzer said.
"It won't be nice. It won't be pleasant. And it probably will go on for awhile."
Stuart G. Hoffman, senior vice president and chief economist at PNC Financial Services, predicted a recovery will begin in six to nine months.
One major reason he sees a recovery coming is the drop in gas prices.
"If you spend a year at $3 a gallon rather than $4 a gallon, American motorists would spend $100 billion less per year filling up their cars," said Hoffman. Noting that the average gallon of gas costs less than $3, he said, "that will put some purchasing power back in the economy."
Pittsburgh, which missed the housing and economic boom experienced in places like Southern California, likely won't be hurt as much by the bust that's going to continue in the meantime, Hoffman said.
"The tortoise has finally pulled ahead of the hare," he said.
Signs of the downturn have begun creeping into the Tepper School, said the school's dean, Ken Dunn. Alumni have increasingly turned to the school's job network, he said.
"I think fundraising is going to be down for awhile. We'll live through that," Dunn said. "It's going to be a tough job market for our students."
Many students are steering their career paths away from the stock trading floor, where as many as one-quarter of Tepper's graduates used to go, Dunn said.
"The glamour of Wall Street is gone," he said.
Andy Vicen, 23, of Shadyside, who just began studies for a master's degree in computational finance at Tepper, says the stock exchange retains some of its allure despite the crisis.
"I think people still gravitate toward it," said Vicen, whose classes will teach him the inner workings of the complex financial instruments that, in the last few months, have confounded experienced traders and knocked the wind out of some of the world's biggest banks. "People still believe if you're good enough, you can do well."
Robert Ostrowski, senior vice president and senior portfolio manager at Federated Investors, said the crisis will be transformative -- for good or ill.
"It's going to change Wall Street as we know it. There are going to be fewer players" as firms shut their doors, he said.
The $700 billion bailout passed by Congress this month, and the Federal Reserve's consecutive interest rate cuts -- including the half-point cut yesterday, which left the federal funds rate at a four-year low of 1 percent -- are starting to have an effect, Ostrowski said.
"The good news is, I think we're beginning to see some signs of this clogged credit market beginning to be unclogged," he said.
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