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How will John Catsimatidis--supermarket billionaire, New York mayoral hopeful and the 215th wealthiest person in America--know when the crisis on Wall Street is over?

"The situation is going to get better when you feel good about buying Citigroup stock," he says. "Right now, nobody feels good about buying it."

With all the turmoil on Wall Street these days, it's easy to get spooked. Miles of newsprint, endless talking heads, pandering candidates and economists quoted up the wazoo--all with opinions, most of them differing.

One group you haven't heard a lot from, though, are America's richest people--some of the savviest entrepreneurs and financiers on the planet. To get some insight into one of the most unpredictable periods in the history of Wall Street, we asked a handful of these billionaires to tell us about the economic indicators they're watching and what they think will happen next.

Don Marron, former chief executive of PaineWebber and founder of investment firm Lightyear Capital, has his eye on asset sales from troubled banks. In the coming months, Marron, a billionaire who is not on The Forbes 400 list, says they'll be an important gauge of how the economy is faring and how Wall Street is recovering.

"You have a number of situations here, notably one company in bankruptcy, where a certain set of assets have to be liquidated, and the market hasn't been tested on these," says Marron. "As a potential buyer, I would want to wait until we see these sales actually take place, and I think others would too."

Will investment banks ever post those eye-popping profits again? "I think it will be a long time getting back there," says Sam Wyly, who knows something about finance from his hedge fund Maverick Capital.

"One thing that I noticed about two years ago was that financial sector of the American economy had grown to percentages that were greatly disproportionate to history," he said. "The financing part of the economy grew much more than the part that was making and selling something. It will be shrinking at least for a while."

©AP Photo/Tony Dejak

Mark Cuban

Stabilizing home prices will be a crucial part of the healing process since it will bolster the value of troubled mortgage securities. When does the housing market bottom? Catsimatidis, who has extensive real estate holdings in the New York area, says, "Home prices stabilize when they equal the cost of actually building of home plus the cost of the land plus a premium for location."

Billionaire entrepreneur George Lindemann, the 262nd wealthiest person in America with a fortune of $1.8 billion, says we'll see values stabilize much more quickly in some areas than others. "I think that's a regional issue and not a national issue. Houston, for instance, is strong as hell. No vacant jobs, prices are going up and building is continuing."

A year ago, Lehman Brothers shares traded for over $60 each. Now they're virtually worthless. Do the problems that totaled the once-mighty Lehman spread to other companies and industries?

"Any company that is built around the need to add debt is in trouble," says Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and founder of HDNet. He ranks 161st on The Forbes 400 this year with a net worth of $2.6 billion. "The process of deleveraging is industry agnostic. If I had the time, I would be researching every company that needs renewable and expandable debt to survive and would short the sh*t out of it."

One thing that's clear is that despite the turmoil of the times, successful businesspeople have no shortage of ideas where to invest. On Monday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one of Warren Buffett's subsidiary companies bought a corporate furnishings division from Aaron Rents.

Wyly, a billionaire who is not on The Forbes 400, advises to invest in areas you know are "rock solid." The author of 1,000 Dollars and An Idea likes companies like energy giant BP. He points to its investments in renewable energy, low price-earning multiple and management team.

As they say, buy when there's blood on the streets. But that raises another question: Who's to blame for the recent torrent?

Mike Bloomberg casts a wide net. The mayor of New York, former Wall Streeter, and founder of financial services company Bloomberg (which made him the 8th richest person in America with a net worth of $20 billion) told reporters Tuesday that, "You can’t just blame the banks, you also can blame the people that took out mortgages ... We were brought up that you first had to put some savings together and then enjoy. But this whole society has gotten to the fact that we’re a ‘now, give it to me today’ kind of society. I think regulation has not been adequate.

"There’s no one person to blame other than all of us," he added.

GALVESTON, Texas - A massive Hurricane Ike sent white waves crashing over a seawall and tossed a disabled 584-foot freighter in rough water as it steamed toward Texas Friday, threatening to devastate coastal towns and batter America's fourth-largest city.

 

Ike's eye was forecast to strike somewhere near Galveston late Friday or early Saturday then head inland for Houston, but the massive system was already buffeting Texas and Louisiana, causing flooding along the Louisiana coast still recovering from Labor Day's Hurricane Gustav.

The National Weather Service warned residents of smaller structures on Galveston they could "face certain death" if they ignored an order to evacuate; most had complied, along with hundreds of thousands of fellow Texans in counties up and down the coastline. But in a move designed to avoid highway gridlock as the storm closed in, most of Houston's 2 million residents hunkered down and were ordered not to leave.

White waves as tall as 15 feet were already crashing over Galveston's seawall. It was enough to scare away Tony Munoz and his wife, Jennifer, who went down to the water to take pictures, then decided that riding out the storm wasn't a good idea after all.

"We started seeing water come up on the streets, then we saw this. We just loaded up everything, got the pets, we're leaving," Tony Munoz, 33, said. "I've been through storms before but this is different."

Ike's 105-mph winds and potential 50-foot waves initially stopped the Coast Guard from attempting a risky helicopter rescue of 22 people aboard a 584-foot freighter that broke down in the path of the storm about 90 miles southeast of Galveston, Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry said. The ship was hauling petroleum coke used to fuel furnaces at steel plants.

But midday Friday, the Coast Guard changed its mind and decided to stage a rescue. Petty Officer Tom Atkeson said rescue swimmers and Coast Guard and Air Force aircraft were on their way to reach the ship.

A stubborn few decided to defy orders to leave. Emory Sallie, 44, of Galveston, said he had braved storms in the past and didn't think Ike would be any different. He didn't believe the dire warnings — he was more worried about the wind, not the flooding.

"If the island is going to disappear it has to be a tsunami," he said, as he walked along the block where his home is located, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. "If it ain't your time you ain't going anywhere."

In Surfside Beach, a small coastal town of about 805, water was already knee-deep in the streets and skies were growing increasingly dark. Police were going around in a dump truck trying to get holdouts to evacuate while there was still time. The police chief asked one stubborn couple to write their names and Social Security numbers on their forearms in black magic marker "in case something bad were to happen." They soon changed their minds, and police were wading an aluminum boat through floodwaters to rescue them.

About 60 miles inland in Houston, officials said residents should not flock to the roadways en masse, creating the same kind of gridlock that cost lives — and a little political capital — when Hurricane Rita threatened Houston in 2005. Some evacuation orders were in effect for low-lying sections of the Houston area, but for the most part, people stayed. Large hospitals in the city moved some patients away from windows, but they did not send them away.

Three days before landfall, Rita bloomed into a Category 5 and tracked toward the city. City and Harris County officials told Houstonians to hit the road, even while the population of Galveston Island was still clogging the freeways. The evacuation itself wound up far more dangerous than the storm: 110 people died during the effort, while the eventual Category 4 storm killed nine. Houston ultimately was spared a direct hit as the storm took a last-minute turn to the northeast and landed on the Texas-Louisiana border.

Houstonians streamed in and out of a grocery store near downtown Friday morning, carts filled with last-minute supplies such as water and Wheat Thins. Ken Wilson, 51, cut short a vacation to California to return home and ready for Ike. He loaded eight gallons of water into his car trunk before heading home to ride out the storm with his wife.

Wilson said it was too late for him to board up his house, though he had stocked up on ice and batteries.

"We'll just tape up to keep things from flying around. I'm apprehensive about how high the winds are going to be, and windows breaking," he said. "What's the philosophy? Run from the water, shelter from the wind? If it's wind: Hunker down."

Business owners Lisa and Tresa Biggerstaff were busy boarding up their shop, Dacapo's Pastry Cafe, located in the city's Heights area.

"We'll just turn it over to God and let whatever happen, happen," Tresa Biggerstaff said as she watched her friend, Preston Witt, cut half-inch thick plywood. "We're not scared at all."

Texans were getting hit from both sides, as the remnants of Tropical Storm Lowell, a Pacific system, dumped nearly 8 inches of rain on Lubbock in 24 hours, flooding homes and roads. Some businesses closed, and Texas Tech University and other schools canceled Friday classes.

Ike would be the first major hurricane to hit a U.S. metropolitan area since Katrina devastated New Orleans three years ago. For Houston — a city filled with gleaming skyscrapers, the nation's biggest refinery and NASA's Johnson Space Center — it would be the first major hurricane since Alicia in August 1983 came ashore on Galveston Island, killing 21 people and causing $2 billion in damage.

Galveston, a barrier island and beach town about 10 feet above sea level, was also the scene of the nation's deadliest hurricane, the great storm of 1900 that left at least 6,000 dead. But that also was before officials had the ability to warn residents that a hurricane was coming, and before the seawall was built to protect the community.

If the storm stays on its projected path, it could head up the Houston ship channel and through Galveston Bay, which Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called a nightmare scenario.

The storm is unusually large, and because of its great size, storm surge and gigantic waves that can flood low-lying areas are the biggest risk. The National Hurricane Center said tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 mph extended across 550 miles, and hurricane-force winds of at least 74 mph stretched for 240 miles. A typical storm has tropical storm-force winds stretching only 300 miles.

At 2 p.m. EDT Friday, the Category 2 storm was centered about 165 miles southeast of Galveston, moving to the west-northwest near 12 mph. Forecasters warned it could become a Category 3 storm with winds of at least 111 mph before the eye strikes land.

Hurricane warnings were in effect over a 400-mile stretch of coastline from south of Corpus Christi to Morgan City, La. Tropical storm warnings extended south almost to the Mexican border and east to the Mississippi-Alabama line, including New Orleans.

The oil and gas industry was closely watching the storm because it was headed straight for the nation's biggest complex of refineries and petrochemical plants. The upper Texas coast accounts for one-fifth of U.S. refining capacity, and many platforms were shut down. Wholesale gasoline prices jumped to around $4.85 a gallon for fear of vast shortages. That was up substantially from about $3.25 on Wednesday and less than $3 on Tuesday.

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Associated Press writers Kelley Shannon in Austin, Paul Weber and Regina L. Burns in Dallas, John Porretto and Pauline Arrillaga in Houston, Diana Heidgerd in Dallas, and Allen G. Breed, Monica Rohr and video journalist Rich Matthews in Surfside Beach contributed to this report.

INSIDE HURRICANE IKE - Amid the engines' roar, the Air Force Reserve pilots and navigator worked calmly as their huge plane neared the eyewall of Hurricane Ike.

The gray cloud, looming 50,000 feet into the sky like a colossal concrete barrier was four miles thick, and the Lockheed WC-130J was hurtling into it.

"It's a big one, and it's going to get bigger," said Lt. Col. Mark Carter, 54, a pilot who has chased storms for 31 years. "It's off land now, and feeding on the warm water down there while it gets itself back together."

"Down there" is 10,000 feet below, where the swirling dark water and foaming waves of the Gulf of Mexico are only visible intermittently through the clouds.

Carter, and his fellow Hurricane Hunters of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, were finishing a fourth trip across Ike, during a 10-hour, 3,000-mile trek to monitor the storm taking aim at the Texas coast.

The aircraft carved a 210-mile giant "X" pattern through Ike and its eye, just off the western tip of Cuba.

"We're the only military aircraft that has permission to fly through Cuban airspace," said public information officer Maj. Chad Gibson. "We share the information we gather with them."

Using high tech equipment aboard the $72 million plane, the crew gathers data on wind speed, barometric pressure and other information for the National Hurricane Center.

"The plane makes two observations a second," said Maj. Deeann Lufkin, 35, a meteorologist who stood behind a bank of screens as she monitored the storm.

Lufkin, who has more than 50 hurricane flights behind her, took the jostling of the storm as easily as a New York City subway rider handles rush hour.

Like everyone on the crew, Lufkin, of Northfield, Minn., is an Air Force Reservist — a civilian who works summers with the Hurricane Hunters, based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.

"I love this job," said Lufkin, whose husband is also a Hurricane Hunter. "It is endlessly fascinating, and it is also extremely important. We provide information the satellites can't get. And we provide something satellites will never have — a human eye and brain."

The C-130 has been a workhorse of the U.S. military for nearly five decades, is a squat, broad aircraft, painted dull gray, with four black propellers curving over the wings like exotic flowers.

Inside, it resembles a high-tech auto mechanic's garage. Metal grids on the floor offer secure places to stash equipment, insulation covers most of the walls and ceilings, wires shake everywhere, red mesh behind the armless seats offer something to grab onto when the plane starts bucking and tilting in a storm.

Despite its plain looks, Tech. Sgt. Scott Blair, a big man with close-cropped gray hair and tattoos running up his arms, calls the aircraft his girlfriend.

"I've been married 21 years," said Blair, 38, who runs Fat Boy's BBQ restaurant in Picayune. Miss., when not flying into storms. "She's never had call to be jealous until I started flying on this plane. Now she calls it my mistress."

Flights can run as long as 15 hours, not counting preflight and post-flight briefings.

Once ordered into a storm, the 10 crews made up of six people each, fly on a rotating basis, 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

The flights go into everything from developing tropical storms to Category 5 hurricanes. But they don't fly into a storm over land because of the danger of tornadoes.

Since the flights officially began in 1943, only four Hurricane Hunter planes have been lost in the bump and grind through the clouds — the last in 1974.

It doesn't take much to draw out stories of the storms that have tilted the plane at dangerous angles, sent shudders down its metal spine and through its human occupants, banging untethered people against the ceiling as ride-along journalists scramble for plastic bags amid lurching stomachs.

Blair, who dozed in free in-flight moments with a copy of the book "Unholy War" spread across his stomach, was nonchalant about the Ike flight.

But he remembers others that were more eventful.

"Hurricane Charlie, what was that '03, '04?" Blair said. "That almost beat us to death. We made a pass through it as a Category 2, and 45 minutes later, when we went back through, it was a Cat 4. Every reporter on board had a bag up to his face."

The storms are most dangerous as they build or break apart, Blair said. That's when a potentially deadly microburst of wind and huge up-and downdrafts threaten the plane.

Dangerous or not, the flights, with their combination of boredom and adrenaline-pumping moments, appear to be addictive.

"I'm going to keep doing this until I get too old or my hearing goes," Blair said. "Then I'll just sit up in Picayune (Miss.) and drink beer and eat barbecue and dream about it."