09/27/08 "I hate to use the phrase 'masters of the universe,' but they're not in investment banking anymore, they're in hedge funds,"

Yvette Kantrow: Dim, Doom, Downtown: Tom Wolfe, The New York Times and the End of New York City?

The Huffington Post

Quick -- you're a journalist who needs to describe the culture of our imploding Wall Street to a largely lay audience. What are you going to do? Reach back to the '80s of course!

There's Tom Wolfe and "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Everyone read that, right? Or at least saw the movie. Kurt Andersen and Spy magazine. "American Psycho." Gordon Gekko. "Liar's Poker." And don't forget to throw in a Porsche.

All of these '80s touchstones managed to find their way into a Sept. 21 story in The New York Times about the dashed dreams of "young financiers." (Even its headline, "Dim Lights, Big City," played on '80s nostalgia.) The piece bemoans the death-of-Wall-Street-and-therefore-New-York-as-we-know-it, which has become a staple of downturn journalism, from the 1990 recession to the more recent tech bust. To give its doomsday thesis some gravitas, the Times raises Andersen: "Wall Street's highfliers helped rebrand the city in the eyes of the world, Mr. Andersen said, from a tired postindustrial necropolis to a sleek 21st-century financial dynamo. And that is the city today. Or it was."

Was? Is New York over already? Apparently. The Times rolls out Wolfe, who declared Greenwich, Conn., "the new Wall Street" because of its hedge fund density.

"I hate to use the phrase 'masters of the universe,' but they're not in investment banking anymore, they're in hedge funds," Wolfe said. It's an idea he revisited a few days later in The New York Observer: "There's nothing as second-rate as investment banks. Every smart and ambitious young man -- and forget young women because they don't play any role in this -- wants to be in a hedge fund. And I'd be surprised if the hedge funds implode, they're just smarter." That's an interesting observation from someone who less than two years ago, in a piece for Portfolio magazine, characterized the hedge fund crowd as status-seeking vulgarians with vile manners and bad taste. But we digress.

Wolfe wasn't the only one stripping bankers of their alleged status last week. There was also Holly Peterson, whose claim to fame, other than being Pete Peterson's daughter, is that she wrote "The Manny," a novel about a dreamy male nanny on the Upper East Side. She showed up on ABC News' "20/20" on Sept. 19 to declare, "The gilded age is over." .......