NEW YORK: At Bottomless Closet, a New York nonprofit that helps women move from welfare to jobs, Kendall Farrell said she may cut back on workshops and look elsewhere for money as Wall Street money dries up.

With layoffs, buyouts and cutbacks rippling through financial markets, charities that rely on donations from highly paid professionals are bracing for a slump.

Thirty percent of charitable giving comes from the richest 1 percent of the population, which includes many Wall Street professionals, according to FSG Social Impact Advisers in Boston.

“When the economy goes down people tend to tighten their purse strings, and oftentimes charity and philanthropy can be the first thing that is affected,” said Farrell, executive director of Bottomless Closet.

Several charities will miss Bear Stearns, which agreed to be acquired by JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share on Sunday. Starting in the 1970s, that investment bank has required all senior managing directors to give at least 4 percent of their annual incomes to charity.

The charitable trust of Bear Stearnss chairman, James Cayne, has been an important donor for Bottomless Closet. Fourteen months ago, shares in Bear Stearns traded at $160 each. Their sale to JPMorgan Chase for $2 has vastly devalued Caynes 4.9 percent stake in the company. His trust also holds thousands of Bear Stearns shares.

Corporate donations invariably drop in a recession.

Teen Lifeline, a crisis hotline for teens in Phoenix, Arizona, is focusing its appeals on individual donors, considered to be more reliable givers in good times and bad.

“Too many times we have been dependent on government and corporate donations and grants, and so more and more nonprofits are going back to individual donors who are more passionate and connected to your cause,” said Bill Manson, development director of Teen Lifeline.

“Private donors stay more connected to you, whereas corporations say, We have a budget, ” he said.

Gifts of stock to charities have become more popular in recent years but their value declines as markets slide.

Smaller charities may suffer from a recession disproportionately, according to Susan Raymond of Changing Our World, a consultant on strategic planning for nonprofits. Those with a more diverse financing base are better equipped to survive.

“It can have an outsized effect on a small, community-based nonprofit, but a larger nonprofit can afford to wait it out,” she said.

Donations have already declined since late 2007, when the housing slump deepened, according to Michael Nilsen of the Association of Fund-Raising Professionals.

“Im not hearing anybody scream yet, but people are definitely concerned,” he said.

In the last economic slowdown, charitable donations fell only mildly but took three years to bounce back. They dropped by 2.2 percent from 2000 to 2001 around the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, continued to fall slightly for the next two years but jumped almost 7 percent from 2003 to 2004, Raymond said.

Human beings are creatures of habit—the morning coffee with two sugars, the post-lunch brush and floss, the bedtime yoga routine with lights dimmed. Advertisers, on the other hand, often try to break those habits by wedging new products and services into various parts of the day.

Now comes ad giant BBDO Worldwide with its latest weapon to help clients get an edge: An extensive global study of daily rituals. Unlike habits or routines, which may be ingrained but carry no emotional meaning, a ritual is described in the study as “a defined series of actions that helps us transform from one emotional state to another.”

Many of those actions involve favorite things, naturally, and BBDO’s hope is that the data will help clients insert their products into those rituals. “We didn’t have categories or brands in mind,” says Tracy Lovatt,director of behavioral planning at BBDO North America. “We wanted to study the power of rituals in our lives.”

The study comes at a time when ad agencies are struggling to find new ways to reach customers, and emphasize the value of their work to clients. “This is another example of how the richest source of insight comes from observing behavior,” says BBDO President and Chief Executive Andrew Robertson. Making Meaning

But rituals are something many associate with rites of passage—marriage, death, even the transition to a new season. BBDO, in contrast, came up with five that occur every day in every part of the world: “preparing for battle” (the morning ritual), “feasting” (reconnecting with your tribe over food), “sexing up” (primping), “returning to camp” (leaving the work place), and “protecting yourself for the future” (the ritual before bed).

Each label is meant to suggest a defined emotional state that permeates each set of behaviors. The notion resonates with anthropologist Norman Stolzoff, founder of Ethnographic Insight. “The idea that the day could be carved

up into meaningful times is clever,” he says. “Rituals form meaning.”

As part of the study, researchers asked more than 5,000 people in 21 countries how they behave during these five transitional periods of the day. While people in every culture report engaging in rituals for similar reasons, they approach them quite differently. About 41% of Chinese respondents said they schedule sex, for example, while only 3% of Russians do—and 7% of Americans. Nightly Lockdown

Fully 44% of Brazilians read in the bathroom, according to the study; in Saudi Arabia, 10% of respondents do. More than half of all Indian respondents surf the Web before leaving the house, while less than one-third of Americans or Canadians do. About 80% of Saudi Arabians pray or meditate before work; in Germany, 3% of respondents do.

The rituals that are easiest to understand occur in the morning and evening. Marketers have long appreciated the value of getting a foothold in the tightly scheduled morning ritual, when people tend to stick with a routine and a particular set of products. BBDO participants reported doing an average of seven activities in under an hour, from brushing their teeth and drinking coffee to checking e-mail (participants between the ages of 60 and 70 reported the highest rate of e-mail use).

BBDO dubbed the period before bed “protecting yourself for the future.” That’s because the survey found people in self-preservation mode, as they went about locking windows and doors, applying wrinkle cream, and selecting clothes or “armor” for the next day. It’s a brief period, but also the perfect time to find customers at their most vulnerable. As BBDO’s Robertson, a former insurance salesman, puts it: “If there was some way to be in the home as people are going through lockdown, you could probably sell a lot of insurance.”

NEW YORK: Shocked by the rapid demise of Bear Stearns and its fire sale to JPMorgan Chase, investors are worrying about Lehman Brothers and several other financial companies.

Lehmans shares began Monday 35 percent lower than on Friday and recovered slightly, ending at $31.75, down $7.51, or 19.1 percent. A whopping 224 million shares traded hands, or 16 times the normal volume.

Since the U.S. mortgage market crisis unfolded in the summer, investors have fretted that Lehman Brothers would stumble, and its stock has fallen from a peak of $82 a share then. It was a major player in the market for subprime and prime mortgages, and it is the smallest of the major Wall Street firms.

Still, the storied investment bank has defied expectations more than once, as in 1998, when it seemed to teeter after a worldwide currency crisis, only to rebound strongly.

“Its not surprising that people are looking to Lehman next,” said Jeffrey Harte, a brokerage stock analyst at Sandler ONeill Partners, a Chicago-based research firm. He said Lehman and Bear had a number of similarities. Both had relatively small balance sheets, they were heavily dependent on the mortgage market, and they relied heavily on the repurchase market, most often used as a short-term financing tool.

Richard Fuld Jr., Lehmans famously intense leader, who flew back from India over the weekend, says Lehman has studied the past and is in good shape today, with a comfortable level of funding, or liquidity.

“We learned a ton in 98,” Fuld said. “We have a much different liquidity profile today than we did then.” Fuld was referring to investors panic after Russia defaulted on its debt, pushing a big hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, to the precipice. The Wall Street bailout of that fund proved to be the nadir in that financial crisis of nearly a decade ago.

“Ninety-eight was pretty ugly for us,” Fuld said. “This is uglier for the system - its more pervasive and more global.”

Lehman was not the only financial stock hit hard on Monday. MF Global, a large global commodities broker, dropped 65 percent, while Washington Mutual fell 12.8 percent, and Morgan Stanley closed down 8 percent. The Amex broker-dealer index fell 10.3 percent.

Shares of many other financial institutions followed Lehmans shares down on Monday, but JPMorgan rose $3.77, or 10.3 percent, to $40.31. That helped support the Dow Jones industrial average, which rose 21.16, or 0.18 percent, to 11,972.25.

According to an analysis by Buckingham Research Associates, an independent research firm, Lehman has $169.8 billion in total liquidity, comparable to $168.6 billion at Goldman Sachs and a considerable step up from the $35.3 billion at Bear Stearns. In an examination of all the major brokers over the weekend, Buckingham concluded that Lehman, though the smallest firm on Wall Street, has the highest percentage of liquidity (25 percent) of total assets, suggesting a strong cushion.

According to the firms securities filings, Lehman has $35 billion in cash and liquid assets and $160 billion in unencumbered assets - like loans and securities backed by commercial mortgages that it can use as collateral to borrow more, should it desire.

Lehmans doubters are not convinced, citing several issues. Recent concerns about financing essentially amount to a question of confidence. Lehmans management is battling that issue by being far more aggressive in talking about its financial strength than it did a decade ago.

The skeptics point to the rapid growth of Lehmans Level 3 assets - those that the firm says have no “observable” market value. Those assets more than doubled in the last six months of last year, rising to $42 billion.

Other areas for concern include Lehmans $39 billion in commercial real estate assets and $37 billion more in residential mortgages, businesses that have been hammered this year. If the moves in the real estate indexes were applied to the firms totals, Lehman would take an estimated hit of $5 billion to $6 billion. (Lehmans critics declined to be identified because hedge funds that short a companys stock are often accused of profiting from another companys pain.)

Lehman has argued in the past that it saw the mortgage crisis coming and hedged effectively against some of the downturn.

Fuld, who is often referred to as “the warrior” or “the survivor,” is not shying from skeptical markets. Having admitted he made a mistake by ignoring market rumors in 1998, he made a public statement on Monday.

“The Federal Reserves decision to create a lending facility for primary dealers and permit a broad range of investment-grade securities to serve as collateral improves the liquidity picture,” he said, and “from my perspective, takes the liquidity issue for the entire industry off the table.”