Joe Nocera and Roger Lowenstein are among those signing big book deals in the past week to capture history in the making. Lowenstein, who has become our modern scribe of panics and crashes, certainly has the chops. For me, Joe Nocera's often overlooked classic, A Piece of the Action, explained a key era in our changing attitude about money. When I was writing a book about RE/MAX, Nocera's book helped me understand what stagflation did to the real estate market and how that influenced buying and saving behaviors for a generation. Fascinating stuff.
But back to Wall Street. It seemed appropriate that Tom Wolfe weighed in. Although, if you're looking for schadenfreude, Wolfe claims that the "masters of the universe" aren't in bonds anymore, they're all working for hedge funds in Connecticut. Since we're throwing around languages like a European, The Bonfire of the Vanities had a fin de siecle feel about the glory days of bygone companies such as Lehman Brothers and Salomon Brothers. That other classic, Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker, was also a cautionary tale. But it brought an eager froth to the mouths of my friends in business school, many of whom jumped into finance as a result.
Not surprisingly, they liked this guy, too. It was the 80's after all. But the speech is interesting. "...that other malfunctioning company called the USA...." A complicated business and the more things change...
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