Posted on 09/28/2008 10:38:11 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Dim, doom, downturn
Fri Sep 26, 2008 9:53pm EDT
by Yvette Kantrow from The Deal.com
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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.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Ping!
Except for Chelsea Clinton, but I'm not sure she counts...
Hah!
About a year behind the times. It’s international in a way that Tom Wolfe or Ollie Stoner can’t imagine.
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