Fashion Industry Fast Money : State of Fashion Economy

Tonight I was watching Fast Money (a program on CNBC). One of their segments tonight was regarding New York Fashion Week and how it is effected by the consumer slow down. They mentioned a few stats that I thought you might be interested in knowing. - New York City's Fashion Industry provides 175,000 jobs and $10 Billion in total wages. I am not sure where they got the stats, so really do not know how correct the numbers are... Anyway, just thought I would pass along the numbers. Unfortunately, I am not clever enough to figure out how many zeros are in a billion. But my guess is that $10 Billion dollars is a nice chunk of change. Dividing that amount out among 175,000 people (jobs), would give us the average salary for the New York fashion industry. (if you actually care, there are 9 zeros in a billion; therefore I believe there to be 10 zeros in 10 billion...). The show also mentioned that the Fashion Industry in general is a $200 Billion industry for the US. If our industry is so large, and sales are declining because of the economic slow down, where is the fashion industries bailout??? Here is another bit of information that I learned when watching fast money tonight. It appears that Italy's textile & clothing industry is requesting government aid as consumers slow on buying designer clothing...