Bonfire of the Vanities

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pages: 98 words: 29,610

From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, The Chicago School, urban renewal

Also by Tom Wolfe The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby The Pump House Gang The Painted Word The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine The Right Stuff In Our Time The Bonfire of the Vanities A Man in Full Hooking Up I Am Charlotte Simmons Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Bonfire of the Vanities, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. He lives in New York City. Notes 1 The government thought (quite mistakenly) that a new and cosmopolitan architecture might help transcend the country’s bitter racial and ethnic hostilities. 2 It was sometimes permissible to construct a “mono-pitch” roof, a roof with one sloping surface instead of two; and this exception to the rule for worker housing in the 1920s is given devout homage today, on a gigantic scale, in such office towers as the Citicorp Building in New York and Pennzoil Place in Houston. 3 Likewise, in the field of psychology.


pages: 137 words: 35,041

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

The Self-Censoring Artist Amid the rabble of tourists that typically undulate in and around Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, you would be forgiven for heedlessly stepping over the round marble plaque that marks the spot where the Dominican Friar Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and incinerated in 1498. His fate had a certain talionic quality, for only a year before, in this same square, his followers had orchestrated their famous ‘bonfire of the vanities’. In a frenzy of religious fervour, they had torched thousands of objects associated with sin and moral degeneracy: cosmetics, dresses, mirrors, perfumes, books and even musical instruments. The city had been spellbound by Savonarola’s fanaticism, and were purging themselves before the apocalypse that their new spiritual leader insisted was imminent.

Index A abuses of state power 67 academic freedom 60–3 Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Williams) 63 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 21, 22 Almansor (Heine) 94 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 19, 93 Ancient Greeks 58 ‘anecdotal evidence’ 32 anti-censorship campaigners 17 anti-Semitism 18–19, 66, 80 Arendt, Hannah 72 Areopagitica (Milton) 3–4 ‘art’ 56 artists 55–8 Associated Press 50 Atwood, Margaret 26 Auschwitz 80 authoritarianism 89 avoidance of conflict 35–6 B Barrett, Lisa Feldman 70 ‘Battle of Cable Street’ 20 Benn, Tony 69 Berkeley, University of California 33 Bernstein, Eduard 97 big tech corporations 11–13, 45 ‘blackshirts’ 20 blasphemy 51 Boghossian, Peter 74 ‘bonfire of the vanities’ 55 books censors 4 destruction 94 humanistic culture 9–10 moral or immoral 83 Botticelli, Sandro 55 Boyle, Danny 84 Bradbury, Ray 11 Brexit 67 British Library 95 C cancel culture 25–30, 42–3, 63, 96 Cardozo, Benjamin 33 Catholic Church 9 Cato Institute 28 Cave, Nick 27 Censored (Coleman) 87 censorship and the censors 85 and criticism 16, 24 and the Internet 13 metaphor of sunlight 44 of printed texts 4 right-leaning tabloids 7 right-wing talking point 6 and social media 11, 45 tech giants 13 Charbonnier, Stéphane (‘Charb’) 50, 51, 53 Charlie Hebdo 50, 51–3 ‘Charter 77’ committee 3 Chomsky, Noam 26 Christakis, Erika 61 Christakis, Nicholas 61–2 ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign 83 Clinton, Chelsea 79 Coleman, Paul 87 College of Policing 88 comedians and comedy 49–50, 56 see also satire Communications Act 2003 (UK) 66, 89 Communications Decency Act 1996 (US) 12 concept creep 46–7, 68 consent 75 Cope, Edward Drinker 74 Cox, Jo 82 Crash (Cronenberg) 84 criticism 16, 24, 32, 57 Cronenberg, David 84 ‘crowded theatre’ argument 22–4 Crown Prosecution Service 88 ‘culture wars’ 2, 63–4 D Danning, Gordon 81 Darwin, Charles 74 Davis, Daryl 17–18, 69 ‘Day of Absence’ protests 62 debating defeated ideas 68 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 10 decolonising authors 96 ‘Decolonising Working Group,’ British Library 95 Defending My Enemy (Neier) 19 democratic accountability 11 ‘despotism of custom’ (Mill) 57 dictatorships 90 ‘direct-effects model’ 84 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88 disinformation 85 Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (Paine) 18 diversity 33 ‘dog whistle’ 16 Dorsey, Jack 12 dystopian fiction 11 E Eddo-Lodge, Reni 27–8 emotional and intellectual comfort 37 emotional pain 75 ‘The English People’ (Orwell) 59 Enlightenment 10 European Court of Human Rights 87 European Union referendum (2016) 59 Evergreen State College 62 F Facebook 12, 13 ‘fact-checking’ 13 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) 11 ‘fake news’ 12, 85 fascism 32–3, 67–8 feminism 71 First Amendment of the United States Constitution 10, 11 First Principles (Spencer) 43 forced conversions 43 Foucault, Michel 73 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 61 Founding Fathers 10, 11 France 50 Frankfurt School 83 ‘free speech crisis’ 89 ‘Free Speech Is Killing Us’ (Marantz) 81–2 French Revolution 10 Fritsch, Theodor 66 G Galileo 4 ‘gaslighting’ 25–6 gender identity 30 gender-neutral pronouns 89 gender self-identification 26, 71 Goebbels, Joseph 66, 80, 94 Gopnik, Adam 72 ‘gramophone mind’ (Orwell) 97 ‘grossly offensive’ online speech 89 H Haidt, Jonathan 70, 71 Hall, Radclyffe 84 Hardy, Thomas 75 Harper’s Magazine 26–7 Hate Crime Operational Guidance (College of Policing) 88 ‘hate crimes’ 88 ‘hate incidents’ 88 ‘hate speech’ 12, 19, 87–91, 96–7 ‘hate speech’ laws 22, 52–3, 66–7, 87 Havel, Václav 3 Hazlitt, William 43, 60 Heine, Heinrich 94 higher education 60–1 see also universities historical discrimination 33 Hitchens, Christopher 3 Hitler 10, 66 Hobbes, Thomas 6 Holland, Tom 73–4 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 22–3 Holocaust denial 68 House of Commons 82 humanistic culture 9–10 Humberside Police 1 Hutus 77 I identity issues 33–4 identity-obsessed activism 83 ‘identity quakes’ 74 inciting violence 77–85 Internet 13, 45, 96 see also social media Is Free Speech Racist?


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

King, I’m Victor, one of the new summer associates.” Penn King was tall, blond, and—we soon learned—a legendary government bond salesman whose reputation extended far beyond Wall Street. The author Tom Wolfe had shadowed King, using him as the model for “Master of the Universe” Sherman McCoy in his bestselling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Penn King peered down at Victor, smiled graciously, and offered a hand to shake. We observed them from a distance, trying to hide our envy, while Victor confidently asked if he could sit in an empty chair not far from King. It wasn’t even a folding chair; it was the real deal, armrests and all.

The article went on to talk about how much money he made, a topic of conversation that was very taboo on Wall Street at the time. Over the seven years since the Fortune cover, he’d risen to the top of Salomon’s M&A group. He was the quintessential aspiring Master of the Universe of 1980s Wall Street—pompous, smug, brimming with bravado—not quite suave enough for a place in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but he seemed to be auditioning for the part. Mike Soenen—just flown in from Kalamazoo, carrying an empty briefcase from meeting to meeting to keep up appearances—had never heard of David Wittig. Mike settled down in a chair facing the big desk, and Wittig slid an open binder across it to Mike.

* * * Managing and refining one’s personal image was another way this desire to control information and perception was manifested. Through the 1980s and into the ’90s, the persona of the “investment banker” became firmly rooted in the public consciousness—spurred on by men real and imagined, like David Wittig and Gordon Gekko; bolstered by books like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Barbarians at the Gate; lionized in the public imagination by their portrayal in films, such as the iconic scene from American Psycho where a bunch of Wall Streeters are sitting around in a conference room trying to one-up one another with the design and quality of their business cards, and the stakes seem murderously high.


pages: 290 words: 83,248

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Wall Street became ‘Disneyland for adults’, in the words of one corporate finance executive eagerly anticipating a $9 million bonus in 1986. But Wall Street’s newfound fame turned sour for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The huge rewards led to conspicuous consumption, flash spending and growing media interest in life on Wall Street. In the late 1980s Tom Wolfe’s bestseller Bonfire of the Vanities, Michael Douglas’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street and Michael Lewis’s tale of the Salomon Brothers jungle, Liar’s Poker, picked out some not very attractive characteristics of investment banking people.16 A crop of insider trading and market manipulation cases – notably the Boesky and Milken affairs in America and the Guinness scandal in the UK – revived old memories of greed and corruption in financial circles.17 Ivan Boesky was a prominent risk arbitrageur – someone who takes stock market positions in the hope of profiting from takeover bids – who received a prison sentence and a $100 million fine in 1986 after admitting to trading on insiders’ tips.18 Boesky was well known in financial circles but what shocked the public at large was where the trail led.

Stiglitz, Joseph, The Roaring Nineties (Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 87–114; Krugman, Paul, The Great Unravelling (Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 295–325. 14. Augar, Philip, and Palmer, Joy, The Rise of the Player Manager (Penguin Books, 2002), p. 12. 15. Lowenstein, Roger, Origins of the Crash (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 24–5. 16. Wolfe, Tom, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987); Wall Street (American Entertainment/20th Century Fox, 1987); Lewis, Michael, Liar’s Poker (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989). 17. Bruck, Connie, The Predators’ Ball (Penguin Books, 1989); Stewart, James B., Den of Thieves (Simon & Schuster, 1991); Kochan, Nick, and Pym, Hugh, The Guinness Affair (Christopher Helm, 1987). 18.

Index 401K amendment, US tax code 9 accounting treatment/rules fees 177 stock options 201, 209 Ackermann, Josef 122 acquisitions see M&A (mergers and acquisitions) advisory work, fees 90–91, 94–5, 96–7 Alper, Andrew 182 American Express 40 American model, spread of 169–71, 199 analysts 65–9, 207, 213 bubble, role in creating 159, 160 ‘buy’ recommendations, prevalence of 67–8, 72, 141, 159, 196 company valuations 72–3 as competitive tool 145–8 increase in prominence 140–44 pressure facing 196 regulation of 19, 201–2 anti-trust action/legislation 5–6, 7–8, 26 AOL 13, 14, 76–7 auditors 21, 161, 200 Banerji, Arnab 184 Bank of America 31 Bankers Trust 11–12, 44, 78, 127–8 Barings 11, 128 barriers to entry 102–3, 140, 146, 149, 168, 213 basis point pricing 91–3 Bear Stearns 30, 34, 36, 37, 45–6, 112, 117 bid offer spread 115 Blankfein, Lloyd 117–18 block trades 87–8 Blodgett, Henry 19, 136 Bloomberg, Michael 182 boards of directors 163, 178–9, 200–201, 203–4 Boesky, Ivan 10 Boisi, Geoffrey 35 Bollinger, Judy 140–41, 142, 148 bond market crash, 1994 127–8 bond traders 133 Bonfire of the Vanities 9 book-building 92 boutiques, advisory 32, 164 Brandeis, Louis D. 6 brokers 15–16, 66–7, 69, 133, 165 fees 191, 192, 194 and fund managers 190–91, 192, 204, 209 and proprietary trading 192 and structural reform 211–14 Brown, Edgar D. 7 Brown, Tom 143–4 bubble 12–13, 158–60 Buffett, Warren 41, 79, 201 ‘bulge-bracket’ firms, overview of 30–31, 36–44 bull market mentality 3–5, 12–13, 64, 65, 71–3 bundling 193, 209 Bush, President George W. 18 ‘buy’ recommendations, prevalence of 15–17, 67–8, 72, 142, 159, 196 capital, forms of 54 Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) 57–8 capital markets, development of 63–4, 125 cartel, presence of in investment banking 25–6, 98–103, 168, 199–200 competition, driving out 145–9, 151 entry into top group of banks 44–6, 48 market concentration 46–7, 98–9 pricing 93–8, 100–103 and structural reform 214–15 Cayne, James 46 Cazenove 32 CEOs 174–8, 179, 201, 203–4 courting of 150–51 and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) 162, 163 power of 163 Chase Manhattan 45 Chen, Hsuan-Chi 90, 94–5 Citigroup 20, 31, 37, 42–3, 149, 207–8 block trading 87 corruption/malpractice 41–2, 150–51 and Enron 42, 82–3, 182–3 and Parmalat 84 class actions 20, 21 client analysis 163 client trading, and proprietary trading 115–16, 117–19, 211–12 Coffee, Professor John 181 collusion, and free markets 171–2 commercial banks 121, 127 compensation 51, 58–60, 99–100, 165–6 as anti-competitive tool 146–9 and corruption/malpractice 196 and cost control 134–6, 138 excess, source of 166–7 competition, extent of see cartel, presence of in investment banking complex derivatives 78, 80, 81–4, 89, 161–2, 202–3 concentration 46–7, 98–9 confidentiality, and lack of price negotiation 176–7 conflict of interest 16–17, 22–3, 120, 144–5, 151–2, 210–11 boards of directors 178–9 fund managers 191, 194–5 reform, efforts by banks 24, 118, 205–6 regulation 19, 185–6, 187–90, 201–2, 205, 210 structural reform 211–13 UK 170–71 corporate control 162, 163–4, 193–5, 203–4 corporate finance 9, 119–21, 142 corporate governance, recent reform 200–201 corruption/malpractice 9–12, 14–18, 21–3, 151–54, 160, 173–4, 195–8 ‘clean-up’ following 19–20, 200–211 corporate corruption 161–2 CSFB 17, 43–4, 83, 121, 137–8, 151 culture of 168–9 derivatives 11–12, 44, 81–4, 151, 161–2 Enron 41, 81, 82–3, 121, 182–3 explanations of 65 fund managers 190–91, 194–5 future prospects 208–9, 215–16 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) 17–18, 19, 43, 137, 144–5, 160, 196 and regulation 22, 23, 185–6, 202–3 Salomon Brothers/Salomon Smith Barney 17, 41–43, 137, 150–51 WorldCom 17, 121, 150–51, 161 Corvis 71–2 Corzine, Jon 4, 65, 182, 188 cost control 45, 134–9 cost of equity capital 57–8 crashes 125–6 1987 126–7 1994 (bond market) 127–8 2000 13–14, 125–6 emerging markets crisis (1998) 130 credit derivatives 47, 82 Credit Suisse 20, 31, 32 cross-selling 122 CSFB (Credit Suisse First Boston) 37, 43–4, 136–7 corruption/malpractice 17, 43–4, 83, 121, 137, 151 cost control 137–8 and emerging markets crisis, 1998 130 CSFP (Credit Suisse Financial Products) 78, 136 Culhane, Simon 184 cynicism, culture of 151–3 Davies, Sir Howard 189 debt capital 54 Dell, Michael 151 Den of Thieves 107 Derby, Peter 205 deregulation 8, 180–81, 199 derivatives 33, 77–84, 100, 161–2 margins on 88–9 misselling scandals 11–12, 44, 151 regulation of 183, 202–3 Deutsche Bank 31, 32, 37 Dillon Read 34, 36 Dinallo, Eric 15, 24, 188–9 Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette 137, 143–4 Donaldson, William 23–4, 143, 187, 205 dot-com companies 4, 13, 71, 188 Drexel Burnham Lambert 10, 26, 44, 127 Drucker, Peter 54 e-mails, as evidence of malpractice 16–17 Ebbers, Bernard J. 150, 151 economy, performance of, role of investment banks 25, 63–5, 100, 157–8, 199, 214 efficient market theory 69 Electric Storage Battery, takeover of 35 emerging markets crisis, 1998 130 employees nature of 123, 197, 198 numbers of 61, 136, 138 see also compensation Endlich, Lisa 114 Enron 42, 81, 82–3, 121, 182–3 equity capital 54–8 ‘Fannie Mae’ 80–81 Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation 80 fees accounting treatment 177 advisory work 90–91, 94–5, 96–7 brokers 191, 192, 193 bundling 193, 209 fixed commissions, abolition of 34–5 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) 89–90, 91–3, 94–5, 96, 177, 179–80 M&A (mergers and acquisitions) 90–92, 96, 176–8 see also prices First Boston 34, 36, 37 Fisher, Peter 182 fixed commissions, abolition of 34–5 fixed income, growth of 133 free market ideology 8, 12, 20, 168–72, 173–4, 194, 197, 215 Freeman, Robert 11, 107 Friedman, Stephen 182 front running 111 Fuld, Richard 124–5 fund manager services 65–9, 133, 165, 204 fund managers 190–95, 204, 209 funds, performance of 164–5, 190 futures 77, 126 General Electric 44–5, 80 Giuliani, Rudolph 10 Gleacher, Eric 32, 38, 164 Global Crossing 82 global operations/globalization 32–3, 63, 128, 133–4 Goldman Sachs 11, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37–8, 111, 148 and conflict of interest 206 earnings, recent 61 and emerging markets crisis, 1998 130 narcissism 198 political contributions 181 prices 86 proprietary trading 114, 117 risk management 112–13 value-at-risk 117 Google IPO 44, 90, 203 governments 180–84 Gramm, Phil 183 Gramm, Wendy 183 Grasso, Richard 187 Great Crash 6–7 Greenberg, Ace 45 Greenhill, Robert 32, 38, 164 Greenspan, Alan 4, 78–9, 158, 209 Gregory, Professor Alan 170 Grubman, Jack 16, 19, 161, 195 Guinness 11 Gutfreund, John 41 Hanbury, Jim 108 hedge funds 69, 133, 160, 165, 194 Heywood, Jeremy 184 Hintz, Brad 88 history/development of investment banking 5–13, 34–6, 134, 199 HSBC 31 hubris 198 IBM 35 ICI 170 illegality see corruption/malpractice importance of investment banks 29, 32 inflation, and return on equity (ROE) 55, 56 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) 4, 14, 69–74 analysts, role of 142–3, 144–5 and bubble 159–60 corruption/malpractice 17–18, 19, 43, 137, 144–5, 160, 196 fees 89–90, 91–3, 94–5, 96, 177, 179–80 Google 44, 90, 203 long term performance 73 offer price 70–73, 179–80 reform of system 203 regulation of 202 standards, lowering of 159–60 innovation 131–4, 208–9 insider trading 9–11 integration 22, 33, 107–8, 111, 119, 122, 168 as anti-competitive tool 145–6, 148–9, 151 and conflict of interest 22–3, 118, 206, 211–12 and corporate finance 119–21 development of 140–45 as flawed concept 151–53 and identification of profits 192–3 and regulation 22, 23, 24, 185–6 structural reform 211–15 in UK 170–71 International Swaps Dealers Association 183 internet 4, 129 stocks 4, 13, 71, 188 Investment Banking: A Tale of Three Cities 131 IT revolution, 1990s 129 J.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

I shall then move on to the broader economic effects of financialisation on economic stability, on the performance of business and on economic inequality. The rise of the trader No sooner did you pass the fake fireplace than you heard an ungodly roar, like the roar of a mob … It was the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987 We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. … We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position.

The elements of the new trading culture – based around fixed income, currency and commodities, and turbo-charged by derivatives – were now in place. Markets in shares were no longer the centre of speculative activity. Fixed interest, currency and, later, commodities (FICC) were central to the new trading culture. Sherman McCoy, the vainglorious anti-hero of Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, was, like Nick Carraway, a bond trader. But the environment in which McCoy worked was very different from that experienced by Nick Carraway. The changes that occurred in the structure of financial services firms are described in more detail below, but with these firms the dominant ethos changed radically.

., 2012, ‘The UK’s External Balance Sheet: The International Investment Position (IIP)’, Office for National Statistics, March, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/bop/the-international-investment-position/2010/art-uk-s-iip.html. Wolf, M., 2008, Fixing Global Finance, Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Wolfe, H., 1930, The Uncelestial City, London, Gollancz. Wolfe, T., 1987, The Bonfire of the Vanities, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Woodward, R.U., 2001, Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom, New York and London, Simon and Schuster. Zeleny, J., 2008, ‘Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy’, The New York Times, 9 November. Ziegler, P.S., 1988, The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1765–1929, London, Collins, 1988.


The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

., “The Mystery of Language Evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology, May 7, 2014. 159 Chris Sinha, “Language and Other Artifacts: Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Niche Construction,” Frontiers in Psychology, October 20, 2015. 160 Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 193. About the Author Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his BA at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American Studies at Yale. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City.

Also by Tom Wolfe The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby The Pump House Gang The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers The Painted Word Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine The Right Stuff In Our Time From Bauhaus to Our House The Purple Decades The Bonfire of the Vanities A Man in Full Hooking Up I Am Charlotte Simmons Back to Blood Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters. Sign Up Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters Contents Cover Title Page Welcome Dedication Chapter I The Beast Who Talked Chapter II Gentlemen and Old Pals Chapter III The Dark Ages Chapter IV Noam Charisma Chapter V What the Flycatcher Caught Chapter VI The Firewall Notes About the Author Also by Tom Wolfe Newsletters Copyright Copyright © 2016 by Tom Wolfe Cover design by Keith Hayes Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

Greed in all its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much. The same theme was addressed in literature. In 1990, one of America’s foremost writers, Tom Wolfe, released a blockbuster bestseller entitled The Bonfire of the Vanities.6 The book dealt with what Wolfe called the ‘‘big, rich slices of contemporary life,’’ in this case the heady materialism of the 1980s. The plot followed the life of Sherman McCoy, a prodigiously successful bond trader at a prestigious Wall Street firm. One night Sherman, accompanied by his mistress, fatally injures a black man in a car accident.

Lou Cannon, President Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 516. CHAPTER 4: A RISING TIDE 1. International Financial Statistics: 1957–1998. 2. National Review, August 31, 1992. 3. Barron’s, February 11, 1984. 4. John Ehrman, The Eighties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 5. Wall Street, imdb.com. 6. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987). 7. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: Modern Library, 1956). 8. Janet Lowe, Secret Empire: How 25 Multinationals Rule the World (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1992), p. 5. 9. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). 10.

White, John Kenneth. The Values Divide. New York: Chatham House, 2003. Williamson, Murray, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. The Iraq War. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2003. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Woodard, J. David. The New Southern Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 2006. Woodward, Bob. The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Woodward, Bob. The Choice. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. York, Byron.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

And in the summer of 1991, riots broke out in Crown Heights after an Orthodox Jewish man crashed his car into the home of a Guyanese immigrant family, killing the family’s young son. These incidents were only the most vivid manifestations of a general sense that the city was coming undone. Throughout these years, violent crime was terrifyingly high, and Brooklyn, my native borough, was a watchword for joblessness and urban decay. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of Tom Wolfe’s characters memorably described Brooklyn’s remaining bourgeois enclaves as little white Hong Kongs amidst a sea of black and brown poverty. These were years when New Yorkers of all colors fled the city in droves, and those of us who remained feared that class and racial conflict might at any moment spin out of control.

Casey Foundation, 35 anti-gentrification, 20–21, 23–24 anti-immigrant bias, 72–73 anti-poverty spending, 46, 48, 176–77 “Asian values,” 41 assimilation, 12, 13, 20, 63–72, 182–83 immigrants, two kinds of, 69–72 automation, 12–13, 94–96, 107–23, 127–28 cosmopolitan case for, 107–16 baby boomers, intergenerational wealth transfer, 21–22 Bachmeier, James, 117 Backlash Paradox, 88–91 Baldwin, Richard, 148 Bangladeshi immigrants, 2–3, 64, 74–78, 94, 145 Bean, Frank, 117 Betts, Alexander, 146–47 between-group inequality, 26–27 bigotry, 72–73, 88, 90, 91 birthrates, 32–33, 73 birthright citizenship, 57, 59, 60 Bitler, Marianne P., 178 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 182 Borlaug, Norman, 152–53 bracero program, 111–12, 119 Brahmins, 40 Brin, Sergey, 39 British immigrants, 73–74 Brookings Institution, 142 Brown, Susan, 117 Bush, George W., 49 Canada, 26, 60, 170 Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 52 Center for Global Development, 108 Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), 167 “chain migration,” 78.


pages: 928 words: 159,837

Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, European colonialism, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, retail therapy, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning

In a reaction against the splendour and excess of the Medici court, the city fell under the control of Girolamo Savonarola, a humourless Dominican monk who led a stern, puritanical republic. In 1497 the likes of Botticelli gladly consigned their ‘immoral’ works and finery to the flames of the infamous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’. The following year Savonarola fell from public favour and was burned as a heretic. The pro-French leanings of the subsequent republican government brought it into conflict with the pope and his Spanish allies. In 1512 a Spanish force defeated Florence and the Medici were reinstated. Their tyrannical rule endeared them to few and when Rome, ruled by the Medici pope Clement VII, fell to the emperor Charles V in 1527, the Florentines took advantage of this low point in the Medici fortunes to kick the family out again.

Whenever the city entered one of its innumerable political crises, the people would be called here as a parlamento (people’s plebiscite) to rubber-stamp decisions that frequently meant ruin for some ruling families and victory for others. Scenes of great pomp and circumstance alternated with those of terrible suffering: it was here that vehemently pious preacher-leader Savonarola set fire to the city’s art – books, paintings, musical instruments, mirrors, fine clothes and so on – during his famous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in 1497, and where he was hung in chains and burnt as a heretic, along with two other supporters a year later. The same spot where both fires burned is marked by a bronze plaque embedded in the ground in front of Ammannati’s Fontana di Nettuno (Neptune Fountain). With its pin-headed bronze satyrs and divinities frolicking at its edges, this huge fountain is hardly pretty and is much mocked as il biancone (the big white thing), not to mention a waste of good marble, by many a Florentine.

Religious reformer Savonarola took an even darker view of Lorenzo and the classically influenced art he promoted, viewing it as a sinful indulgence in a time of great suffering. When Savonarola ousted the Medici in 1494, he decided that their decadent art had to go, too, and works by Botticelli, Michelangelo and others went up in flames in the massive ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ on Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. THE ORIGINAL MACHIAVELLI Tuscany’s Renaissance legacy was almost lost by the 1966 Great Flood of Florence that left thousands homeless and three million manuscripts and thousands of artworks under mud, stone and sewage. Those heroes who helped dig the treasures from the mud are honoured as gli angeli del fango (angels of mud).


pages: 874 words: 154,810

Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet, Virginia Maxwell, Nicola Williams

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Costa Concordia, G4S, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, post-work, retail therapy, Skype, trade route

In a reaction against the splendour and excess of the Medici court, the city fell under the control of Girolamo Savonarola, a humourless Dominican monk who led a stern, puritanical republic. In 1497 the likes of Botticelli gladly consigned their ‘immoral’ works and finery to the flames of the infamous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’. The following year Savonarola fell from public favour and was burned as a heretic. The pro-French leanings of the subsequent republican government brought it into conflict with the pope and his Spanish allies. In 1512 a Spanish force defeated Florence and the Medici were reinstated. Their tyrannical rule endeared them to few and when Rome, ruled by the Medici Pope Clement VII, fell to the emperor Charles V in 1527, the Florentines took advantage of this low point in the Medici fortunes to kick the family out again.

Whenever the city entered one of its innumerable political crises, the people would be called here as a parlamento (people’s plebiscite) to rubber-stamp decisions that frequently meant ruin for some ruling families and victory for others. Scenes of great pomp and circumstance alternated with those of terrible suffering: it was here that vehemently pious preacher-leader Savonarola set fire to the city’s art – books, paintings, musical instruments, mirrors, fine clothes and so on – during his famous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in 1497, and where he was hung in chains and burnt as a heretic, along with two other supporters a year later. The same spot where both fires burned is marked by a bronze plaque embedded in the ground in front of Ammannati’s Fontana di Nettuno MAP GOOGLE MAP (Neptune Fountain;). With its pin-headed bronze satyrs and divinities frolicking at its edges, this huge fountain is hardly pretty and is much mocked as il biancone (the big white thing), not to mention a waste of good marble, by many a Florentine.

Religious reformer Savonarola took an even darker view of Lorenzo and the classically influenced art he promoted, viewing it as a sinful indulgence in a time of great suffering. When Savonarola ousted the Medici in 1494, he decided that their decadent art had to go, too, and works by Botticelli, Michelangelo and others went up in flames in the massive ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ on Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. HOW MACHIAVELLIAN! Few names have such resonance as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), the Florentine scholar and political thinker who said ‘the times are more powerful than our brains’. He was born into a poor offshoot of one of Florence’s leading families and his essential premise – ‘the end justifies the means’ – is one that continues to live with disturbing terrorism five centuries on.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The 2008 financial crisis has already taught us to respect this class of threat, but we do not yet appreciate how widespread it has become. Systemic risks are also growing within our national and geo-politics. A Renaissance age creates big winners and big losers. Our social bargain is weakening, just when the technologies to summon solidarity, or rally rebellion, are made common and powerful. Five hundred years ago, the Bonfire of the Vanities, religious wars, the Inquisition and ever-more-frequent popular revolts tore at the peace in which genius labored and smothered some of the brightest lights of the age. Now, voices of extremism, protectionism and xenophobia likewise seek to tear apart the connections that spark present-day genius, while popular discontent has sapped our public institutions of the legitimacy needed to take bold actions.

—Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498)1 Empowered prophets In early February 1497, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and his band of fanatic youth followers gathered up all the tangible evidence of this strange new age they could lay their hands on—immoral books, heretical texts, nude paintings and sculptures, indecent perfumes, new musical instruments and baubles from far away—and piled them into a giant heap in Florence’s central piazza, rising 60 feet high in seven tiers to represent the seven deadly sins. On February 7, Carnival Day, Savonarola set fire to the lot in an event that became known to history as the Bonfire of the Vanities. By itself, that act wasn’t so remarkable. Public bonfires to burn away sin had been lit by Italian clergy before—by Bernardino da Siena in the 1420s, and more recently by Bernardino da Feltre in 1483.2 Nor was Savonarola’s message new. He spoke, in a loud and gifted voice, against moral corruption in society and against the church’s complicity with it, but the same could have been said of many preachers before him.3 In a previous time and place, Savonarola might have been marginalized and ignored.

See also Copernicus, Nicolaus Australia, 20, 43, 225 automation, 116, 146, 167 Aztecs, 9, 19, 93 al-Baghdadi, Bakr, 207, 208–9 Barker, Robert, 30 Berlin Wall, 4, 7, 10, 21–2, 77–8 Bhopal Union Carbide disaster, 99 bin Laden, Osama, 166, 210 Black Death, 1, 70, 72–3, 93, 143, 173–5, 177, 184 Bohr, Niels, 124 Bonfire of the Vanities, 8, 203–4. See also Savonarola, Girolamo Botticelli, Sandro: Madonna of the Book, 109 Brahe, Tycho, 29, 35, 106, 263 Brant, Sebastian, 26 Brazil, 43, 54, 68, 248, 262 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 90, 93, 109, 142, 204, 239, 246 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 6, 109, 132, 142, 246, 266 Creation of Adam, 1, 151, 240 David, 2, 3, 235–6 Dying Slave, 110 Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1, 9, 240 Bush, George H.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Surveys carried out by the University of Michigan have also shed useful light on income distribution, in particular on the dynamics of income over time. There is also anecdotal evidence: Tom Wolfe noted the soaring demand for apartments in Manhattan’s “Good Buildings” well before academics had started to take the growing concentration of wealth seriously, and indeed his Bonfire of the Vanities arguably tells you all you need to know about the subject. WHAT THE CENSUS SHOWS Most academic studies on the distribution of income in the United States rely on Census data, compiled from the Current Population Survey. These data have certain limitations, to which I will turn in a moment.

Economics,” 125 Baily, Martin, 127 Baker, Dean, 169 Bangladesh, 243–44 banking system: unregulated “shadow” of, 9 vulnerability to panics, 82, 89 banknotes, 411, 412, 413 Bank of England, 103, 128 Barnhart, Jo Anne, 26 Barrasso, John, 57 Bartley, Robert, 271, 276 Batchelder, Lily, 239 Beck, Glenn, 356 behavioral finance, 145–46 benefits enhancement, 210, 211–12 Berlin Wall, fall of, 188, 358 Bernanke, Ben, 82, 130, 140, 141 and financial crisis (2007–2008), 89, 147 on income inequality, 282, 283 bin Salman, Mohammed, 371 bipartisanship, 198 Bitcoin, 411–14 Black, Duncan, 157 Blackwater affair, 299 Blanchard, Olivier, 130, 139, 194, 203–5 Blasey Ford, Christine, 345, 346 Bloomberg, Michael, 306 Boehner, John, 362 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 262, 270 bothsidesism, 297–98, 375, 378 Bowles, Erskine, 198, 199, 203, 218 Bowyer, Jerry, 44 “Bridge Too Far, A” (Krugman), 175–77 Britain: Brexit, 158 budget surpluses of, 154 currency of, 180 economy of, 180 hard-money policy in, 185 health care in, 45, 47, 48 retirement system in, 22–24 Brunnermeier, Markus, 412 bubbles: ends of, 87 see also specific bubbles Buckley, William, 408 budget, balancing, 6 budget deficits, 96, 104, 105, 107, 120, 157–58, 179 “deficit scolds,” 194, 207, 209 deficit spending, 153, 218 budget surplus, 154 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 87 Bush, George H.

(Dew-Becker and Gordon), 283 Whitaker, Matthew, 333 white nationalism, 343, 346, 360 “Why Not the Worst?” (Krugman), 343–44, 350 wildfire, growing risks of, 332 Will, George, 381 Wilson, William Julius, 292 When Work Disappears; The World of the New Urban Poor, 286–87 wing-nut welfare, 303 Wisconsin, Republican Party in, 369 Wolfe, Tom, Bonfire of the Vanities, 262, 270 Wolff, Edward, 270 working class: anti-worker bias in politics, 290, 318, 351–53 falling incomes of, 96, 244 family values of, 286 and health care, 352 and income inequality, 259–60, 272, 273 and “skills gap,” 167–68 stagnating wages of, 92, 168, 288, 289 tax increases on, 20, 221–23 and trade war, 372 and unions, 218, 289–90, 317 work opportunities available to, 286–87, 292 World Trade Organization (WTO), 247, 252 World War I, war debts from, 254 World War II: postwar economic growth, 219, 234 postwar trading system, 244, 250 wage controls in, 270 Wren-Lewis, Simon, 5, 385–86 “WSJ calculation,” 280 Yellen, Janet, 97 Yunus, Muhammad, 388 Zandi, Mark, 113 “zero lower bound” interest rates, 142–43, 153 zombie ideas: on climate change, 4 cutting taxes on the rich, 4, 215–17 eating people’s brains, 3–4 and health care, 216 on impossibility of universal health coverage, 4 invasion of, 259 in movement conservatism, 8 and racism, 4 Zucman, Gabriel, 238–39, 349 ALSO BY PAUL KRUGMAN End This Depression Now!


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The role of corporations in these developments, of course, has not always been positive. Roman publicans became renowned for their greed and corruption, leading to their eternal association with sinners in the Bible. The Medici Bank in Florence was denounced for engaging in usury, and the Dominican friar Savonarola led bonfires of the vanities to campaign against their vices. Big Tech is under assault on any number of fronts, from its privacy practices to its monopoly positions to its handling of free speech. Sometimes corporations are the hero. Sometimes they are the villain. But they are always on the stage. This book is divided into eight chapters, each devoted to a single corporation.

The new government confiscated the Medici Bank’s assets, and the bank disappeared from existence, never to return. The Medici Bank’s days at the center of the Renaissance were finally over. Soon after, Florence would fall under the thrall of a very different master, Girolamo Savonarola, the fanatical Dominican friar who railed against the vices of the rich and led bonfires of the vanities in Florence’s piazzas, burning sinful luxury objects such as books, mirrors, musical instruments, and paintings. But the legacy of the Medici Bank continues to this day. Its innovative financial products, originally created to circumvent the Vatican’s harsh usury laws, transformed the European economy.

Over the next several decades, the Medici family would navigate the complex political situation to perfection, taking control of the bankers’ guild, winning over the Vatican, and turning Florence into the financial center of all of Europe. The Medici then lavished their great riches on arts and learning, and their largesse in a very real sense ushered in the Renaissance. But by the end of the century, the Medici Bank was gone, the Medici family had been exiled, and the friar Savonarola was conducting bonfires of the vanities in Florence’s piazzas. The causes of this dramatic decline were many and complicated—resentment, negligence, malfeasance, and wider economic conditions all played a role—but at the heart of the matter was a failure to think for the long term. This might strike a casual observer as surprising: the Medici, after all, spent lavishly on the art and architecture of Florence, the results of which still redound to the glory of the city and the genius of its artists today—and didn’t they make these donations for the sake of eternity and their everlasting souls?


pages: 257 words: 71,686

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Emanuel Derman, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flash crash, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, inventory management, job-hopping, Large Hadron Collider, light touch regulation, London Whale, Money creation, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, regulatory arbitrage, Satyajit Das, selection bias, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, too big to fail

This is a former managing director talking me through the listing of a new company on the stock exchange. Until he fell into a depression and dropped out, he had been a classic ‘Master of the Universe’ banker. To my surprise, this type of banker seemed perfectly happy with the name, even though Tom Wolfe coined it in Bonfire of the Vanities in the eighties to satirise the overwheening confidence of the ambitious young men who racked up millions on Wall Street. Many Master of the Universe bankers did not seem to know the providence of their nickname, nor did they seem to care. Neither for the literature nor for the irony. That said, whenever they described their work I couldn’t help but feel a sense of recognition, affinity even.

Index ABN Amro 1, 2 accountancy firms 1, 2, 3 and incentives 1 Adoboli, Kweku 1 AIG 1, 2, 3 al-Qaida 1 amorality 1, 2, 3, 4 Anderson, Geraint 1 Ankenbrand, Bernd 1 Asperger’s syndrome 1, 2 asset management 1 author’s Guardian blog 1 (see also Guardian) first interviews posted on 1 ‘Going native …’ subtitle of 1 readers’ comments posted on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 responses to interviews on 1, 2 traditional banking said to be under-represented on 1 Back from the Brink (Darling) 1, 2, 3 back office 1, 2 Bank of America, mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 banker types: blinkered 1, 2 cold fish 1 and Faustian pacts 1 legality defines ‘ethics’ of 1 corresponding to animals 1 delusional 1, 2 Masters of the Universe 1 passim, 1, 2 cold fish’s scorn for 1 criticism of sector resented by 1 sector readily defended by 1 neutrals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 nicknames for 1 teeth grinders 1, 2, 3, 4 bankers (see also banks): in back office 1, 2 evaluation of colleagues by 1 and Faustian pacts 1 and hopping between jobs 1, 2 leisure-time spending by 1, 2 (see also financial sector: remuneration in) and love life 1 in middle office 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 more power and status in, post-crash 1 nicknames used by 1 not alone in causing financial crisis 1 (see also global financial crisis) and religion 1 types of, see banker types working hours of 1, 2, 3, 4 banks (see also bankers; central banks; financial sector): ABN Amro 1, 2 abusive culture in 1 accountancy firms used by 1, 2, 3 annual results announcements of 1 balances of, as ‘blackest of black holes’ 1 Bank of America, mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 Barclays, mixed investment– commercial nature of 1 Barings 1 rogue trader at 1 BNP Paribas, mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 capital buffers of 1, 2, 3 capital buffers of 1, 2 Casenove 1 and caveat emptor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Citigroup 1, 2 mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 ‘close and continuous supervision’ of 1 (see also regulators) combined investment–commercial nature of 1 commercial: definition of, clarified 1 vs investment 1, 2 investment banks taken over by 1 Deutsche Bank 1 mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 divide between different types of 1 as dog-eat-dog world 1 Goldman Sachs 1 as exception to short-termism 1 as ‘pure’ investment bank 1 Smith’s book on 1 Smith’s NYT piece on 1, 2 HR personnel in, and redundancy 1 HSBC 1 annual results announcement of 1, 2 and drugs money 1, 2 mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 and incentives: ‘perverse’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 short-termism encouraged by 1 insurance’s overlap with 1 as ‘intensely political’ workplaces 1 investment: ‘animal’ types within 1 books about 1 as ‘casinos’ 1, 2, 3 and ‘castes’ 1 vs commercial 1, 2 commercial banks begin to take over 1 culpability of, in global financial crash 1 daily routine of 1, 2, 3 definition of, clarified 1 and dot-com bubble 1, 2, 3 job titles within 1, 2, 3 radically changed ownership structure of 1 and risk and compliance 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (see also regulators) risk-taker–risk-bearer dichotomy in 1 and ‘rock’n’roll traders’ 1 speculation by 1 subcultures engendered by 1 and IT 1, 2 patches and workarounds in 1 JP Morgan 1 rogue trader at 1, 2 Lehman Brothers: collapse of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 inadequate buffers of 1 as ‘pure’ investment bank 1 Lloyds, annual results announcement of 1, 2 mega- 1 investment banks’ mutation with 1 speculate with people’s savings 1 Merrill Lynch 1 Morgan Grenfell 1 and prop trading 1, 2, 3, 4 rating agencies paid by 1 (see also credit-rating agencies) RBS, annual results announcement of 1, 2 recruitment in 1, 2 and redundancy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 as ‘enhanced severance’ 1 as rite of passage 1 termed ‘the cull’ 1 in UK vs US 1, 2 and work-related visas 1 and regulators 1 fighting symptoms rather than cause 1 and Financial Services Authority, Financial Conduct Authority, Prudential Regulation Authority 1 identification of, with financial sector 1 ‘idiots’ description applied to 1, 2 ‘losing people at all levels’ post-crash 1 numbers working for 1 and self-declaration 1 Salomon Brothers 1 Samuel Montagu 1 Schroders 1 silo mentality in 1 Société Générale: mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 rogue trader at 1 and ‘too big to fail’ concept 1, 2, 3, 4 and ability to blackmail 1 and ‘too big to manage’ concept 1 UBS 1 rogue trader at 1, 2 unpopularity of employees in 1 zero job security in 1, 2 and diminishing employee loyalty 1, 2, 3 Barbarians at the Gate (Burrough, Helyar) 1 Barclays: mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 Sants offered top job at 1 Barings, rogue trader at 1, 2 Binge Trading: The Real Inside Story of Cash, Cocaine and Corruption in the City (Freedman) 1 Blair, Tony, ‘adviser’ role of 1, 2, 3 blinkered bankers 1, 2 (see also banker types) BNP Paribas, mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe) 1 bonuses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 (see also remuneration) Labour’s plan to levy extra tax on 1 Brown, Gordon, financial sector praised by 1 buffers, see capital buffers Buiter, Willem 1 Canary Wharf 1 capital buffers 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘capture’ 1 Casenove 1 caveat emptor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 CDOs (collateralised debt obligations) 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘hybrid’ 1, 2 and rating agencies 1 ‘squared’ 1 ‘synthetic’ 1, 2 central banks 1, 2 (see also banks) Bank of England 1 reaction of, to global financial crisis 1 Swiss 1 CERN 1 charity donations 1 Chinese walls 1, 2, 3 Citigroup 1, 2 mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 City (see also banks; financial sector): amorality in 1, 2, 3 anti-Semitism, sexism, snobbery and homophobia in 1 codes and mores of 1 collection of interviews from (City Lives) 1 crude terminology used in 1 and discrimination 1 ethical dilemmas in 1 greed-driven as popular image of 1 ‘it’s only other people’s money’ mentality in 1 jargon and language of 1 law firms that dominate (‘magic circle’) 1 long-term relationships in 1 and ‘my word is my bond’ 1, 2 as term 1 UK and Europe reshaped in image of 1 City Lives (Courtney, Thompson) 1 Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile (Anderson) 1, 2 Clinton, Hillary 1 code of silence 1, 2, 3, 4 cold fish 1 (see also banker types) and Faustian pacts 1 legality defines ‘ethics’ of 1 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘hybrid’ 1, 2 and rating agencies 1 ‘squared’ 1 ‘synthetic’ 1, 2 commercial banks (see also banks): definition of, clarified 1 vs investment 1, 2 investment banks taken over by 1 Confessions of a City Girl: The Devil Wears Pinstripes (Stcherbatcheff) 1 confidentiality 1 Cooper, George 1 credit-default swaps (CDSs) 1 credit-rating agencies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and CDOs 1 Moody’s 1, 2 ‘oligopoly’ of 1 paid by banks 1 Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Banker (Leveraged Sell-Out) 1 Darling, Alistair 1, 2, 3 memoir of, see Back from the Brink Darwinism, social 1 Das, Satyajit 1 Davies, Howard 1 deals, code names for 1 Deloitte 1 delusional bankers 1, 2 (see also banker types) Der Spiegel 1 Derman, Emanuel 1 Deutsche Bank 1, 2 mixed investment–commercial nature of 1 dot-com bubble 1, 2, 3 economists, unhelpful 1 ‘enhanced severance’ 1 (see also redundancy) Ernst & Young 1 European Banking Union 1 European Commission 1 executive search 1 Financial Conduct Authority 1 financial crash 1 passim bankers not alone in causing 1 books written about 1, 2 and domino effect 1, 2 and government bail-outs 1 harrowing beginnings of 1 ignorance about 1, 2 ignorance of real threat posed by 1 indifference towards 1 investment banks’ culpability in 1 more ‘cock-up than conspiracy’ 1 next 1 parliamentary commissions into 1, 2 political impasse before and after 1 and redundancy 1 regulators’ personnel losses since 1 regulators’ symptoms-overcause response to 1 seen as ‘black swan’ 1 Western world ‘crippled’ by 1 The Financial Crisis: Who Is to Blame?


pages: 799 words: 187,221

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, Commentariolus, crowdsourcing, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, game design, iterative process, lone genius, New Journalism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, urban planning, wikimedia commons

In 1494 a radical friar named Girolamo Savonarola had led a religious rebellion against the ruling Medici and instituted a fundamentalist regime that imposed strict new laws against homosexuality, sodomy, and adultery. Some transgressions were punished by stoning and burning. A militia of young boys was organized to patrol the streets and enforce morals. On Mardi Gras of 1497 Savonarola led what became known as the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which books, art, clothing, and cosmetics were set aflame. The following year, popular opinion turned on him, and he was hanged and burned in the central square of Florence. By Leonardo’s return, the city had again become a republic that celebrated the classics and art, but its confidence was shaken, its exuberance dampened, and the finances of its government and guilds drained.

One pink cap.”3 These might seem like costumes from one of his plays or masquerades, but we know from contemporary accounts that he actually dressed like this when walking about town. It is a delightful image: Leonardo in an Arab hooded cloak or strolling in purple and pink garb, heavy on the satin and velvet. He was tailor-made for a Florence that had rebelled against Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities and was again willing to embrace flamboyant, eccentric, and artistic free spirits. Leonardo made sure that his companion Salai, then twenty-four, was dressed with similar brio, usually also in pink and rose. In one entry Leonardo noted, “On this day I paid Salai three gold ducats which he said he wanted for a pair of rose-colored hose with their trimming.”

MILAN’S DELIGHTFUL DIVERSIONS To understand Leonardo, it is necessary to understand why he moved away from Florence, this time for good. One reason is simple: he liked Milan better. It had no Michelangelo, no cadre of half-brothers suing him, no ghost of his father hovering. It had royalty rather than republicans, with jubilant pageants rather than the after-stench of bonfires of the vanities. It had doting patrons rather than oversight committees. And the foremost patron there was the one who loved Leonardo the most, Charles d’Amboise, the French royal governor who had written a flowery letter reminding the Florentines how brilliant their native son was. But there was more to Leonardo’s move than merely a preference for life in Milan.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

When the printing press was first introduced in Europe, the Catholic Church expected it to unify Christendom by quickly and accurately reproducing a single authoritative version of scripture.9 In practice, the printing press made it possible for iconoclastic thinkers such as Savonarola to challenge church authority, fuelling the hysteria that led to the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which books and artworks were burned in a fit of zealotry. Ultimately, by fuelling the rise of protestantism, the printing press cleaved Christianity in two. The new technology allowed the Bible to be read directly in people’s own languages, and made possible the rapid dissemination of Luther’s sermons.

Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita incomes here remote working here social housing here Brixton riots here broadcasting here Bronze Age here, here, here, here bronze, and shift to iron here Brooks, David here Brynjolfsson, Eric here Burgess, Ernest here bushmeat here, here Byzantine Empire, fall of here Cairncross, Frances here Cairo here calendar, invention of here Cambridge, Massachusetts here Cambridge University here canals here, here, here ‘cancel culture’ here Cape Town here Catholic Church here C40 Cities partnership here Chadwick, Edwin here Chang’an (Xi’an) here, here, here, here Charles, Prince of Wales here charter cities here Chengdu here Chiba here Chicago here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here childbirth, average age at here childcare here, here, here, here, here China here ancient here, here, here, here call-centre workers here cereal production here civil strife here and Covid-19 pandemic here Cultural Revolution here definition of cities here economic liberalization here entry into WTO here Household Responsibility System here hukou system here One Child Policy here Open Coastal Cities here per capita emissions here rapid ageing here Special Economic Zones here technology here urbanization here China Towns here Chinese Communist Party here cholera here, here, here, here Chongqing here cities, definition of here Citigroup here city networks here civil wars here Cleveland here, here, here, here climate change here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here coastal cities here, here, here, here commuting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Concentric Zone Model here Confucius here conspiracy theories here Constantinople here, here containerization here, here Copenhagen here, here Corinth here Cornwall here corruption here Coventry here, here covid-19 see pandemics crime rates here ‘cyberbalkanization’ here cycling here, here, here, here Damascus here Dark Ages here, here data science here de Soto, Hernando here deforestation here, here, here, here Delhi here Dell here Delphic oracle here democracy here, here, here Democratic Republic of Congo here, here, here, here, here, here Deng Xiaoping here dengue fever here Denmark here, here Detroit here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dhaka here, here, here, here, here Dharavi here Diana, Princess of Wales here diasporas here, here Dickens, Charles here district heating systems here Dresden here drought here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drucker, Peter here dual-income households here, here Dubai here, here, here Dunbar, Kevin here Düsseldorf here East Antarctic ice sheet here East China Sea here, here Easterly, William here Eastern Mediterranean here, here, here Ebola here Edinburgh here education here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here higher education here, here, here, here; see also universities Japanese school system here Egypt here, here Ancient here, here, here, here Ehrenhalt, Alan here electric vehicles (EVs) here Engels, Friedrich here Enlightenment here Epic of Gilgamesh here Erfurt here Ethiopia here, here Euripides here European Enlightenment here exchange rates here Facebook here, here, here fake news here famine here, here fertility rates here, here, here ‘15-minute city’ principle here Fischer, Claude here Fleming, Alexander here flooding here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard here, here food shortages here Ford, Henry here, here foreign aid here fossil fuels here, here France here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt here Franklin, Benjamin here Friedman, Thomas here, here Fryer, Roland here Fukuoka here, here Gaetani, Ruben here Galileo Galilei here Ganges River here Garden Cities here Garden of Eden here Gates, Bill here, here gay community here General Electric here General Motors here genetic engineering here gentrification here, here, here, here, here George, Andy here Germany here, here, here, here, here, here Gingrich, Newt here glaciers here Glasgow here Glass, Ruth here global financial crisis here, here, here global population, size of here globalization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Goldstein, Amy here Google here, here, here Goos, Maarten here Grant, Adam here Great Depression here, here Greece, Ancient here, here, here, here, here Griffith Observatory here Gropius, Walter here Gruen, Victor here Gulf Stream here Haiti here Hamburg here Hanseatic League here, here Harappa here, here Harry, Prince here Harvard University here hate speech here Haussmann, Baron here, here Hawaii here Hazlitt, William here healthcare here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here heatwaves here, here Hebei here Heckscher, Eli here Herodotus here Himalayas here Hippocrates here Hippodamus here Hittite Empire here HIV here, here Ho Chi Minh City here Holocene here, here, here homophily here Hong Kong here house prices here, here, here, here, here, here, here Houston here, here, here Howard, Ebenezer here Hudson River here Hugo, Victor here Hume, David here Hurricane Katrina here hybrid working, see remote and hybrid working ice melting here, here import substitution industrialization here InBev here India here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fertility rates here Indonesia here, here Indus River here Indus Valley here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here infant and child mortality here, here, here, here influenza here, here, here ‘information cocoons’ here Instagram here internet here, here, here, here, here, here invention here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here irrigation here, here, here, here Italy here Jacobs, Jane here, here, here Jakarta here, here James, Sheila here Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-war development here schooling system here Jenner, Edward here Jesus Christ here Jobs, Steve here jobs apprenticeships here ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here immigration here, here incomes here, here mayoralty here migration into inner London here population growth here, here, here poverty here, here public transport here, here, here slum housing here social housing here suburbanization here Los Angeles here, here, here, here Louisville here Luoyang here Luther, Martin here Luton Airport here Luxembourg here, here Lyon here McDonald’s here McDonnell Douglas here McLuhan, Marshall here Madagascar here malaria here, here, here, here Malaysia here Mali here malls, reinvention of here Manchester here, here, here, here, here, here, here Manila here Manning, Alan here Markle, Meghan here marriage here Marshall, Alfred here Marshall, Tim here Marx, Karl here Maya here, here measles here, here, here Meetup here mega regions here Mekong River here Memphis, Egypt here, here Mesoamerica here, here Mesopotamia here, here, here metallurgy here metaverse here methane here, here Mexico here Miami here, here, here microbiology here Microsoft here, here, here middle class, rise of here migration policy here millennial generation here Milwaukee here, here Minoan civilization here Mistry, Rohinton here MIT here MMR vaccine here ‘modernization’ theory here Mohenjo-Daro here, here Moretti, Enrico here, here mortality rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here motor car, invention of here Moynihan, Daniel here Mumbai here, here Mumford, Lewis here, here, here, here Munich here, here Mycenaean civilization here Nagoya here, here Nairobi here Nashville here National Landing, Arlington here Natural History Museum here natural resource exports here Nestlé here Netherlands here network effects here New Economics Foundation here New Orleans here, here New York here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here carbon emissions here and Covid-19 pandemic here gentrification here, here housing here, here, here incomes here, here Manhattan here, here, here, here, here population growth here, here and rising sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per capita income here Philadelphia here Philippines here, here Phoenix here, here Pixar here plague here, here, here, here Plato here plough, invention of here pollution here, here, here, here air pollution here, here, here, here population growth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here PORTL here potter’s wheel, invention of here printing press here, here productivity here, here, here, here, here agricultural here, here Protestantism, rise of here public transport here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putnam, Robert here, here quarantine here railways here, here, here, here, here high-speed rail here, here, here Ralston Purina here Reagan, Ronald here recycling here, here religion here remote and hybrid working here, here, here, here Renaissance Florence here, here, here renewable energy here, here Republic of Letters here République des Hyper Voisins here ‘resource curse’ here Rheingold, Howard here Ricardo, David here Rio de Janeiro here Riverside, San Francisco here robotics here Rockefeller, John D. here Roman Empire here, here, here Rome, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Romer, Paul here Rotterdam here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques here, here Sahel here, here sailboat, invention of here St Augustine here St Louis here, here, here Salesforce here San Diego here San Francisco here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gentrification here, here hybrid working here, here San Francisco Bay Area here, here, here Santa Fe here São Paulo here Savonarola, Girolamo here Scientific American here Scott, Emmett J. here sea levels, rising here, here, here Seattle here, here, here, here, here, here Second Opium War here Seneca here Seoul here Shanghai here, here, here, here, here Shantou here Sheffield here, here, here Shen Nung here Shenzhen here, here Siemens here Silk Roads here, here Sinclair, Upton here Singapore here, here, here, here Slater, Samuel here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Snow, John here social capital here social housing here, here social media here, here, here, here, here Socrates here solar panels here South Africa here South Korea here, here, here, here, here, here Southdale Center here specialization here, here, here, here, here, here Spengler, Oswald here Starbucks here Stephenson, Neal here Stewart, General William here Stuttgart here Sub-Saharan Africa here subsidiarity principle here suburbanization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sunstein, Cass here Sweden here, here Sydney here, here, here, here, here, here Syrian refugees here, here Taiwan here Tanzania here telegraph here Tempest, Kae here Thailand here Thames River here, here Thatcher, Margaret here, here, here ‘third places’ here Tianjin here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toffler, Alvin here Tokyo here, here, here, here trade liberalization here trade routes here Trump, Donald here, here tuberculosis here, here, here Twain, Mark here Twitter here, here typhoid here, here typhus here, here Uber here Uganda here Ukraine here, here Umayyad Caliphate here unemployment here, here United Nations here, here United States anti-global populism here anti-trust regulation and industrial consolidation here anxiety and depression here broadcasting here car registrations here cost of education here decline in trust here deindustrialization here Gilded Age here Great Migration here house prices here, here immigration here industrialization here inequality here labour mobility here ‘magnet schools’ here parking spaces here patent filings here per capita emissions here, here per capita incomes here remote working here, here, here return on equity here Rust Belt here schools funding here slavery here socioeconomic mobility here suburbanization here tax revenues here US Federal Housing Authority here US General Social Survey here US Trade Adjustment Assistance Program here universities here, here, here University College London here University of Texas here university-educated professionals here Ur here urban heat island effect here urbanism, subcultural theory of here Uruk here, here, here, here, here vaccines here, here Van Alstyne, Marshall here Vancouver here Venice here, here Vienna here, here Vietnam here voluntary associations here, here Wakefield, Andrew here walking here, here, here Wall Street here Warwick University here Washington University here WELL, The here Welwyn Garden City here wheel, invention of here wildfires here, here William the Conqueror here Wilson, Edward Osborne here, here Wilson, William here World Bank here, here World Health organization here World Trade Organization here World Wide Web here writing, invention of here Wuhan here, here Xiamen here Yangtze River here, here Yangtze River Delta here yellow fever here Yellow River here, here Yersinia pestis here Yokohama here YouTube here, here Yu the Great here Zhuhai here Zoom here Zoroastrianism here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 2023 Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work All rights reserved.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

We buy trusted brands and rely on recommendations from friends or reviews on websites. Our supermarket, as well as our doctor, tries to build a relationship with us. Even in the most monstrous excesses of modern capitalism, social ties and reciprocity are important. In Tom Wolfe’s defining novel of 1980s New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities , a chapter is entitled ‘The Favor Bank’ and Tom Killian, attorney for the bond-trading anti-hero, assures him, ‘Everybody does favors for everybody else. Every chance they get, they make deposits in the Favor Bank.’ 14 The egregious email correspondence between the traders involved in fixing LIBOR and other London securities markets is replete with comments such as ‘I owe you’. 15 Even as they engaged in fraud, the participants engaged with each other through what an anthropologist would recognise as gift exchange.

., ‘Embers of Society: Firelight Talk Among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Vol. 111, No. 39 (2014), 14027–35 Wilde, O., The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Williamson, O. E., Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (New York: Free Press, 1975) Wilson, E. O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (London: Vintage, 1999) Wolfe, T., The Bonfire of the Vanities (London: Cape, 1988) Wood, D. (director), ‘The Missing Page’ in Hancock’s Half Hour: Volume I , BBC (1960) World Bank, ‘How are the Income Group Thresholds Determined?’ < https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/378833-how-are-the-income-group-thresholds-determined > (accessed 11 Jan 2019) World Bank, ‘Poverty Headcount Ratio at $1.90 a Day (2011 PPP) (% of Population)’ (2019) World Health Organization, WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care (2009) Wrangham, R., The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 2019) Zabell, S.

question: and aeronautics, 354 , 355 ; central bank decision-making, 286 ; centrality of, 10 ; Churchill during Second World War, 26 ; as diagnostic process, 184–5 , 186 , 194–5 ; effective use of narrative, 218 , 225 ; experts claiming knowledge they don’t have, 46 ; failure to ask, 10 , 180 , 296 , 300 , 314 , 359 , 405 , 407 , 411 ; and financial theory, 320 , 334 , 335 , 336 , 348 , 367 , 393 ; and good decisions, 119 ; ‘hedgehog’ and the ‘fox’, 222 ; and HIV infections, 375–6 ; incremental changes to narratives, 285 ; and legal reasoning, 204 ; and NASA, 374 ; need for narrative, 315 ; no standardised spreadsheet answer to, 405 ; oil block auctions in USA, 256 ; and pragmatic approach, 209–10 ; predilection for apocalyptic narratives, 361–2 ; public role of the social scientist, 397 ; pursuit of practical knowledge, 383–4 , 385–6 , 388 ; puzzle–mystery distinction, 21 ; Ranke’s view of history, 188 ; in Rumelt’s classes, 10 , 178–9 , 180 , 184 ; Sloan at General Motors, 287 ; and ‘thick description’, 192–5 Whately, Archbishop, 165 wheel, invention of, 39 Whitelaw, William, 412 Wiessner, Polly, 216 Wilde, Oscar, 127 , 167 Wilson, E. O., 158 Wolfe, Tom, The Bonfire of the Vanities , 192 , 229 Woodford, Michael, 117 , 118 , 120 word frequencies, 236–7 World Bank, 99 , 390 World Health Organization (WHO), 375–6 Wozniak, Steve, 29 Wrangham, Richard, 161–2 Wright brothers, 275 Xerox Parc, 28 , 29 , 31 Yap (in Caroline Islands), 96 Yom Kippur war, 223 YouGov, 242 Yucatán asteroid, 32 , 42 , 70 , 72 , 86 , 238 , 402 Zimbabwe, 426 , 428 Zipf, George, 236–7


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

We now know that underlying economic performance – as measured by productivity growth – was already slowing rapidly. And an important part of Minsky’s argument is that behaviour by central bankers can encourage irrational behaviour by others. See M. King, The End of Alchemy: Money, banking and the future of the global economy, Little, Brown, London, 2016. 13.Sherman McCoy, the protagonist in Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, is a Wall Street trader whose life goes horribly wrong just when it seemed to be going so well: he was a self-styled Master of the Universe. 14.For a discussion of the effects of dysfunctional belief systems, see R. Hausmann, ‘Through the Venezuelan looking glass’, Project Syndicate, August 2016, available at: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/venezuela-destructive-belief-systems-by-ricardo-hausmann-2016-08 15.The classic article on asymmetric information is George Akerlof, ‘The market for lemons: Quality, uncertainty and the market mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84:3 (1970), pp. 488–500. 16.See, for example, E.

Why Globalization Works, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004 Wolf, M. Fixing Global Finance: How to curb financial crises in the 21st century, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009 Wolf, M. The Shifts and the Shocks: What we’ve learned – and have still to learn – from the financial crisis, Penguin, London, 2015 Wolf, T. Bonfire of the Vanities, Random House, New York, 1987 Wolff, E.N. Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1961–2013: What happened over the Great Recession?, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 20733, Cambridge, MA, December 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a parallel universe, I might have been tempted to thank Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

Because it goes to the heart of democracy and the nation’s social and economic troubles.” Failure to reach what Geremek called a new “social contract” could lead to more than a war within the party. It could easily touch off a social “explosion.” The novelist Tom Wolfe, in his 1980s bestseller Bonfire of the Vanities, anointed one Reverend Bacon as the man who controlled “the steam” in New York, twisting a social safety valve to release pent-up pressure when racial relations approached the bursting point, or notching them up when he wanted to make a political point. In Poland in early 1989, that role fell to General Jaruzelski.

., 222 Beyond the Wall (Pond), 227, 234 Bill of Rights, U.S., 30 Bismarck Strasse (Berlin), 15 Black Friday (Czech). See Velvet Revolution (Prague; 1989) Bloc That Failed, The (Gati), 39, 224 BMW, 72, 161, 228–229 Bogomolov, Oleg, 63 Bölling, Klaus, 121 Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 65–66, 85 Bond, James, 21 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 53 border guards at the Berlin Wall, 3, 5–10, 15–17, 27, 97–105 fall of Berlin Wall and, 5–10, 97–104, 168–170 Boyd, Gerald M., 222 Brain race, 21 Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Wall, 3, 15, 170, 204 Brazil, 217 Breslau, Karen, 167 Bretton Woods Agreement, 21 Brezhnev, Leonid, 39, 45, 71, 91, 225–226 Brezhnev Doctrine, 39, 45, 63, 91, 227 Brian Lapping Associates, 228 Brokaw, Tom, 9, 183 Brookings Institution, Nuclear Audit, 22–23, 223–224 Bucharest, 105–111 Ceaucescu’s home, 198–200 Ceaucescu’s palace, 107, 198–199 fall of communism and, 193–201 Warsaw Pact summit (1989), 91–95 See also Romania Buckley, William F., Jr., 223 Budapest fall of communism in Hungary, 28, 29–39, 41–42, 46, 61, 66–74, 125, 128, 137, 139–140, 143–145 People’s Picnic (1989), 66–67 reburial of Imre Nagy, 84–88 See also Hungary Bulgaria, fall of communism in, 190–191 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 227 Bush, George H.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is now more unequal than in Uruguay, Nicaragua, Guyana, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Argentina.35 Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States.36 Economically speaking, the richest nation on Earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul’s classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: “You’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.” Why do Americans tolerate this troubling state of affairs? The biggest likely reason is our enduring belief in upward mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

Thompson, The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Jeffrey G. Williamson, Inequality, Poverty, and History (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980). Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar Straus, 1987). 1. Three years before Willford I. King’s book appeared, Frank Hatch Streightoff, an instructor in economics at DePauw, published a book called The Distribution of Incomes in the United States (New York: Columbia University, 1912). But on page 155, Streightoff threw in the towel.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Instead of channelling money from savers to productive investments, financiers indulged in a frenzy of speculative activity to make money from interest, commissions and capital gains. The result was an unstable bubble economy, as investor ‘herds’ moved en masse from place to place. The titans of finance became ‘masters of the universe’, in Tom Wolfe’s famous phrase in The Bonfire of the Vanities, his 1987 novel satirising Wall Street, as they mingled with heads of state and spent time in senior government posts before returning to make yet more money from speculation. The rise of finance was accompanied by more frequent and widespread financial crises, from the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s to the worldwide banking collapse of 2007–08 and subsequent global recession.

W. 1 Phillips curve 1 ‘pig cycle’ effects 1 Piketty, Thomas 1, 2 Pinochet, Augusto 1, 2, 3 platform debt 1 Plato 1 plutocracy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 Polanyi, Karl 1 policing 1 political consultancy 1 Politico magazine 1 Ponzi schemes 1 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 1 POPS (privately owned public spaces) 1 Portfolio Recovery Associates 1 ‘postcapitalism’ 1 poverty traps 1, 2, 3 precariat and commons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and debt 1, 2 and democracy 1, 2 emergence of 1 growth of 1, 2 and rentier platforms 1, 2, 3 revolt of see revolt of precariat predatory creditors 1 ‘primitive rebel’ phase 1 Private Landlords Survey (2010) 1 privatisation and commons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and debt 1, 2 and democracy 1 and neo-liberalism 1 and rentier platforms 1 and revolt of precariat 1 and shaping of rentier capitalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 professionalism 1 ‘profit shifting’ 1 Property Law Act (1925) 1 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 1 Public and Commercial Services Union 1 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) 1, 2, 3. 4, 5, 6 QE (quantitative easing) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Quayle, Dan 1 QuickQuid 1 Reagan, Ronald 1, 2 reCAPTCHA security system 1 ‘recognition’ phase 1 ‘redistribution’ phase 1 Regeneron Pharmaceuticals 1 rentier platforms and automation 1 and cloud labour 1 and commodification 1 and ‘concierge’ economy 1 ecological and safety costs 1 and occupational dismantling 1 and on-call employees 1 and precariat 1, 2, 3 and revolt of precariat 1, 2 and ‘sharing economy’ 1, 2, 3, 4 and underpaid labour 1 and venture capital 1 rentiers ascendency of 1, 2 and British Disease 1 classical images of 1 and commons see commons and debt 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and democracy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 digital/tasking platforms see rentier platforms ‘euthanasia’ of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 lies of rentier capitalism 1, 2, 3 revolt of precariat see revolt of precariat shaping of see shaping of rentier capitalism subsidies for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ‘representation’ phase 1 ‘repression effect’ 1 Research of Gartner 1 revolt of precariat and basic income systems 1 and commons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ‘euthanasia’ of rentiers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 inequality of rentier capitalism 1, 2, 3 and intellectual property 1, 2, 3 and neo-liberalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 organisational forms 1 potential growth of movement 1 progressive political reengagement 1, 2 and rentier platforms 1, 2 rights as demands 1 sovereign wealth funds 1 wage and labour regulation 1, 2 ‘right to buy’ schemes 1, 2, 3, 4 Robbins, Lionel 1 Rockefeller, David 1 Rockefeller, John D. 1 Rolling Stone 1 Romney, Mitt 1 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 1 Ross, Andrew 1 Ross, Michael 1 Rothermere, Viscount 1, 2 Royal Bank of Scotland 1, 2 Royal Mail 1 Royal Parks 1 Rubin, Robert 1, 2 Rudd, Amber 1 Ruralec 1 Ryan, Conor 1 Sainsbury, Lord 1 Samsung 1, 2, 3 Sanders, Bernie 1, 2, 3 Sassen, Saskia 1 school–business partnerships 1 Schröder, Gerhard 1 Schwab Holdings 1 Schwarz, Dieter 1 Scottish Water 1 Second Gilded Age 1, 2, 3 Securitas 1 securitisation 1, 2, 3 selective tax rates 1 Selma 1 shaping of rentier capitalism branding 1 Bretton Woods system 1, 2, 3 and copyright 1 and ‘crony capitalism’ 1, 2, 3 dispute settlement systems 1, 2, 3 global architecture of rentier capitalism 1 lies of rentier capitalism 1 and neo-liberalism 1, 2 patents 1 and privatisation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and ‘shock therapy’ 1, 2 trade and investment treaties 1 ‘sharing economy’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Shelter 1 ‘shock therapy’ 1, 2, 3, 4 Shore Capital 1 Sierakowski, Slawomir 1, 2, 3, 4 silicon revolution 1 Simon, Herbert 1 Sirius Minerals 1 Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship 1 Sky UK 1, 2 SLABS (student loan asset-backed securities) 1, 2 Slim, Carlos 1, 2 Smith, Adam 1 Snow, John 1 Social Care Act (2012) 1 social commons 1, 2, 3 social dividend systems 1, 2 social housing 1 ‘social income’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 social strike 1 SoFi (Social Finance) 1 Solidarność (Solidarity) movement 1 South West Water 1 sovereign wealth funds 1 spatial commons 1, 2 Speenhamland system 1, 2, 3 Spielberg, Steven 1 Springer 1 ‘squeezed state’ 1 Statute of Anne (1710) 1 Statute of Monopolies (1624) 1 StepChange 1 Stevens, Simon 1 ‘strategic’ debt 1 strike action/demonstrations 1, 2, 3 student debt 1, 2 subsidies 1 and austerity 1, 2 and bank ‘bailouts’ 1 and charities 1 and ‘competitiveness’ 1 direct subsidies 1 and moral hazards 1 and ‘non-dom’ status 1 and quantitative easing 1, 2 for rentiers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 selective tax rates 1 and sovereign wealth funds 1 subsidised landlordism 1 tax avoidance and evasion 1 tax breaks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 tax credits 1 Summers, Larry 1, 2 Sun, The 1, 2 Sunday Telegraph 1 Sunday Times 1 Sutton Trust 1 ‘sweetheart deals’ 1 tasking platforms see rentier platforms TaskRabbit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Tatler magazine 1 tax avoidance/evasion 1 tax breaks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 tax credits 1, 2, 3 Tax Justice Network 1 Tax Research UK 1 Taylor & Francis 1 Tennessee Valley Authority 1 ‘tertiary time’ regime 1 Tesco 1 Texas Permanent School Fund 1 Textor, Mark 1 Thames Water 1 Thatcher, Margaret 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 The Bonfire of the Vanities 1 The Constitution of Liberty 1 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 1 The Innovator’s Dilemma 1 think tanks 1 ‘thinner’ democracy 1 ‘Third-Way’ thinking 1, 2, 3 Times, The 1 TISA (Trade in Services Agreement) 1 Tottenham Court Road underground station 1 TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) 1, 2, 3 Trades Union Congress 1, 2 ‘tragedy of the commons’ 1 ‘tranching’ of loans 1 Treaty of Detroit (1950) 1, 2 Treuhand 1 TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) 1, 2, 3, 4 trolling (of patents) 1 Trump, Donald 1, 2 TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) 1, 2, 3, 4 Turnbull, Malcolm 1 Turner, Adair 1 Twain, Mark 1 Uber 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ‘ultra-loose’ monetary policy 1 underpaid labour 1 UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 1 UNHCR (UN refugee agency) 1 Unison 1 Unite 1 UnitedHealth Group 1 universal credit scheme 1 universal justice 1 UpCounsel 1 Upwork 1, 2 Uruguay Round 1, 2, 3 USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) 1 Vattenfall 1 Veblen, Thorstein 1 venture capital 1 Veolia 1 Vero Group 1 Victoria, Queen 1 Villeroy de Galhau, François 1 Vlieghe, Gertjan 1 Warner Chappell Music 1 Watt, James 1 welfare abuse/fraud 1 Wilde, Oscar 1 Wilson, Fergus 1 Wilson, Judith 1 WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Wolf, Martin 1, 2 Wolfe, Tom 1 Wonga 1, 2 Work Capability Assessment 1 Work Programme 1 World Bank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 World Economic Forum 1 world heritage sites 1 Wriglesworth Consultancy 1 WTO (World Trade Organization) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Y Combinator 1 Yanukovych, Viktor 1 Yukos 1 de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice 1 van Zeeland, Marcel 1 Zell, Sam 1 zero-hours contracts 1, 2, 3 Zipcar 1 Copyright First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Biteback Publishing Ltd Westminster Tower 3 Albert Embankment London SE1 7SP Copyright © Guy Standing 2016 Guy Standing has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.


pages: 314 words: 101,452

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, disinformation, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, Irwin Jacobs, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, nuclear winter, Ponzi scheme, risk free rate, The Predators' Ball, yield curve

His mouth never seemed to alter in shape; rather it expanded and contracted proportionally when he spoke. And out of that mouth came a steady stream of bottom-line analysis and profanity. The Piranha, that day, began by devouring the government of France. The French government had issued a bond known as the Giscard (yes, the one described by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe learned of the Giscard from a Salomon trader; in fact, to research his fictional bond salesman, Wolfe had come to 41 and sat spitting distance from the Human Piranha). The Piranha was troubled by the Giscard, so dubbed because it had been the brainchild of the government of Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

That morning I looked into the Japanese market, saw that it was indeed the case, and wondered why I had dreamed of it, since I couldn't recall having ever spoken of the subject. Gobbledygook to you, perhaps. A second language to me. *One of Alexander's financial heroics found its distorted way to the center of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe describes his protagonist, Sherman McCoy, getting himself in trouble with the gold-backed French government bonds, the so-called Giscard bonds It was Alexander who had first discovered the Giscard was mispnced, and far from getting himself in trouble he made many millions of dollars exploiting the mispncing Many of the trades that Alexander suggested followed one of two patterns.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

By 2006, the richest 1 percent gobbled up 23 percent of national wealth.16 In the United States and the United Kingdom, the success of the free-market reforms of the 1980s was closely associated with a boom in the financial services industry, which was swiftly reflected in house prices and popular culture. In the States, the boom was captured in the film Wall Street, with its catchphrase “greed is good,” and in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which stood at 950 on the day Reagan took office, reached a peak of over 2,700 in August 1987—before the stock-market crash of October of that year.17 Some of Reagan’s critics on the left never accepted that his economic policies had succeeded. They saw them as a cruel sleight of hand, fueled by unsustainable tax cuts and deficit spending and hopelessly tilted towards the wealthy.

INDEX Abalkin, Leonid, 56–57 Adelman, Kenneth, 167 Afghanistan, 55, 174, 199, 208–12, 244, 251–56, 258 as failed state, 10, 132, 181 U.S. war in, 96, 165, 167, 169, 174, 181, 185, 209–10, 212, 230, 233, 239, 240, 249, 252–53, 254, 268, 272, 273, 314n Africa, 7, 96, 195, 228, 235, 247, 274, 283, 289 global problems and, 205–8 African National Congress, 36, 69 African Union force, 210 Aganbegyan, Abel, 56–57 Age of Anxiety, 11, 171–292 Age of Optimism, 6, 11, 85, 91–170, 173–75, 183, 188, 191, 194, 195, 208, 231, 246–49, 259–62, 271, 272, 277, 280, 281, 286 antiglobalization movement and, 96, 153, 155–62 democracy and, 99–105 the East and, 135–43 Europe and, 145–53, 290 new world order in, 87, 93, 95–96, 230 peace and, 103, 118, 126–34, 140, 304n power and, 93, 96, 118, 162–70 progress and, 118–26 prosperity and, 107–18, 133, 134, 140, 173, 194 Age of Transformation, 11, 13–90 agriculture, 56, 125, 195, 206, 290 in China, 23, 25, 294n Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 197, 227, 242, 244, 248 Ahmed, Kamal, 313n AIG, 201 air-traffic controllers, 39 Albright, Madeleine, 166 Aliber, Robert, 265 Allende, Salvador, 74 al-Qaeda, 10, 96, 156–57, 161–62, 210, 252, 256 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 39, 163–64, 167–68 Angola, 43, 131, 205, 247 Annan, Kofi, 132 antiglobalization movement, 96, 153, 155–62 antitrust cases, 120 apartheid, 69, 70 Apple, 120, 261 Aquino, Corazon, 43 Arab world, 269 Argentina, 77, 78, 188 democracy in, 17, 71, 72 Falklands War and, 34, 73, 76 military regime in, 73, 75, 76 Arizona, 211, 260 Asia, 24, 66, 94, 110, 111, 114, 117, 134–43, 157, 184, 195, 200, 205, 217, 245, 256, 274, 279 democracy in, 18, 85, 94, 283 economic crisis in (1997–98), 6, 107–8, 141–43, 159, 218, 269 rise of, 4, 6, 8, 9, 46, 59–60, 73, 80, 95, 137–40, 143, 146, 173, 262 see also East Asia; specific places Asian values, 138 Aslund, Anders, 221 Audacity of Hope, The (Obama), 170 Austria, 68, 269 authoritarianism, 9, 75–76, 124, 138, 140, 174, 175–76, 233–49, 257, 283, 284 global government and, 220, 221, 223, 231 Axis of Hugo, 241–42, 249 Baghdad, 124, 125, 148, 253–54 bailouts, 113, 142, 188–89, 195 Balkan wars, 125, 130–33, 145, 146 Balls, Ed, 3 Baltic states, 58–59, 235 Bangalore, 84–85, 141 banks, 142, 159, 191–92, 200 see also investment banks BBC, 108, 279 Beijing, 15, 25, 27, 65, 137, 190, 202–3, 206, 234–38, 240, 261, 268, 305n Tiananmen Square massacre in, see China, Tiananmen Square massacre in Belarus, 59 Belgrade, U.S. bombing of Chinese embassy in, 268 Berlin, East, 65 Berlin, West, 63 Berlin Wall, fall of, 11, 43, 63, 67, 68, 69, 73, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 165, 180, 312n-13n Bernanke, Ben, 116–17 Bezos, Jeff, 120 Bhutto, Benazir, 211, 252 Blair, Tony, 43–44, 114–15, 118, 132, 201–2, 279–80 Bloom, Allan, 99, 100, 104 Boeing, 6, 155 Bolivia, 72, 78, 242 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 40 Boot, Max, 146, 167, 168 Bosnia, 131, 132, 133, 231 Branden, Nathaniel, 109 Brazil, 17, 71, 73, 75–78, 176, 244, 245, 246, 286 in BRICs, 76–77, 196 global government and, 217, 219, 226, 227 zero-sum future and, 262, 276 Bremmer, Ian, 193 Bretton Woods, 9 Brezhnev, Leonid, 54, 64 Brezhnev Doctrine, 64, 67 Brickell, Mark, 112–13 BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), 76–77, 196 Bright, John, 128 Brookings Institution, 139, 256 Brown, Gordon, 3, 114, 117 Brussels, 213, 215, 311n Buchanan, Pat, 42, 157–58, 260 Bulgaria, 145–48 Burma, 160, 227, 274, 275 Bush, George H.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

He had been a graduate student at the London School of Economics, despised the concentration at his native Prince-ton on two-dimensional economics, but, almost by chance, was wafted into a world in which his starting salary was twice that of his professor, and then made cruel mock of the whole greedy and stupid business of the bond market. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities remains the outstanding novel of the decade and perhaps even the half -century. He too had made his observations on the trading floor of Salomon Brothers, once a rather staid and safe Wall Street house, turned into a sort of perambulatory worldwide casino. The money thereby let loose might well be directed towards assets held by the State - in most countries, many.

In 1934 the Stavisky scandal had almost destroyed republican, democratic France, since government ministers and parliamentary deputies had been found to be involved in an upended credit pyramid, the apex of which stood in the municipal pawn-shop of Bayonne; the Madoff running it was found dead in mysterious circumstances. Now, in New York, life imitated art, in this case Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: the makers of ‘junk bonds’ vanished into prison as recession pricked their bubbles. In London the empire of Robert Maxwell collapsed. He (repulsively: the baseball cap making it worse), larger than life, was a lie from the start. He was not, as he claimed, a Czech and therefore a gallant ally.

Melanie Phillips, All Must Have Prizes (1996), is another on education. In general, Alan Sked, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Post-War Britain (1997), and Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain (2009), can be strongly recommended. The fate of the eighties ‘revolution’ in the Atlantic world causes head-shaking. The poet of the era is Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), but there are precursors of great power, Radical Chic (1970), The Painted Word (1975), and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), making mock. For England, Simon Jenkins, Accountable to None (1995), is a brilliant book. David Frum, Dead Right (1995), shows how developments in finance derailed affairs in the USA.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

Is this the fault of the middle classes for being exclusive, and for hugging to themselves some of the most important products that England creates for the world? Or is it something to do with the prevailing culture? 4 The third clue: the corrosive explosion of finance ‘On Wall Street he and a few others — how many? — three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? — had become precisely that … Masters of the Universe.’ Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987 One of the peculiarities of the financial world over the past two decades or more, which has drawn even more of the middle classes into its grip, has been the recruitment of physicists and mathematicians into the exclusive world of trading and electronic markets — the growing belief that there were patterns to be recognized in the markets if only you could see them.

Basic salaries in the City doubled in two years. middle-class England tut-tutted, but failed to see the significance. Even Norman Tebbit, who had taken over the trade portfolio from Parkinson after his resignation, called pay levels ‘ridiculous and extremely embarrassing’.[18] This was the period when the novelist Tom Wolfe published his bestselling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, where his hero Sherman McCoy — one of the ‘Masters of the Universe’ in Wall Street — was unable to explain to his son what he did for a living. The three-year run-up to Big Bang in London rid the City once and for all of its old aristocratic snobbery and deference. The new City was classless, even egalitarian, in its relentless pursuit of profit, but the extraordinary salaries were a sign that perhaps it might not stay classless — a small clue that a ferocious new class was emerging.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

The economic and political elites could agree that innovation was good, and that homeownership was good. But the ideology of finance went beyond the idea that Wall Street was good for America. Banking was not only the center of the U.S. economy—it became cool, seductive, and even sexy. In 1987, Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities introduced the term “Master of the Universe” to American culture, in the form of multimillionaire investment banker Sherman McCoy, who lived in “the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world.”72 Although the term was used sarcastically, and McCoy turns out badly in both the human and financial senses, the image of the swashbuckling, super-rich banker engaged in transactions too complex to be understood by ordinary mortals was born.

Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage, supra note 33, at Table A-1. 71. Alan Greenspan, “Consumer Finance” (lecture, Federal Reserve System’s Fourth Annual Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, D.C., April 8, 2005), available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/speeches/2005/20050408/ default.htm. 72. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987), 9. 73. Stanley Weiser, “Repeat After Me: Greed Is Not Good,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2008, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/05/entertainment/ca-wallstreet5. 74. Michael Lewis, “The End,” Portfolio, December 2008, available at http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom. 75.


pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

If banks couldn’t borrow from one another for less than 20%, surely corporations and governments that were trying to issue bonds would need to pay even higher rates (since typically bonds are more risky than interbank loans). The so-called bond bores of the 1970s, traders who had chosen to work in the least exciting of the financial markets, now needed to cope with the most variable market of all. (Sherman McCoy, the star-crossed antihero of Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, was an eighties-era bond trader who took himself to be so important, given the changes in the bond markets during the late seventies and early eighties, that he privately called himself a “Master of the Universe.” The name has stuck, now used to refer to Wall Street traders of all stripes.)

Barron’s, May 11. Wilson, E. B. 1901. Vector Analysis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. — — — . 1912. Advanced Calculus. Boston: Ginn and Company. — — — . 1931. “Reminiscences of Gibbs by a Student and Colleague.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 37 (6). Wolfe, Tom. 1987. Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wood, John Cunningham, and Michael McClure. 1999. Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists. London: Routledge. Wu, Tai Tsun, and Chen Ning Yang. 1975. “Concept of Nonintegrable Phase Factors and Global Formulation of Gauge Fields.”


pages: 382 words: 105,166

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Quotation from Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 66. 2. Ibid., 66, 259, 194. 3. Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank 1397–1494 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 2–3; Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, eds., Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities (Florence: Giunti Editore, 2011), 121. 4. Origo, The Merchant of Prato, 194; De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank 1397–1494, 38, 194. 5. Origo, The Merchant of Prato, 259, 276; Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New York: W.

“Parliament and the Idea of Political Accountability in Early Modern Britain.” In Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America, edited by Maija Jansson, 45–62. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Sebregondi, Ludovica, and Tim Parks, eds. Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities. Florence: Giunti Editore, 2011. Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal. Lettres de Mme de Sévigné. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1846. Shovlin, John. The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Skinner, Quentin.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Serve in opaque tumbler of awed, ill informed media coverage.1 Hedge fund managers: “considered [themselves] part of the new era and the new breed, a Wall Street egalitarian, a Master of the Universe, who was only a respecter of performance.”2 The original Masters of the Universe were HeMan and his Friends in the 1980s popular children’s cartoon. Tom Wolfe used the term to satirize his bond trader protagonist in Bonfire of the Vanities. In 2009, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, unconsciously borrowed from Wolfe to justify bumper profits: “performance is the ultimate narrative.”3 By the new millennium, Wolfe admitted that hedge fund managers had superseded bankers as the new Masters of the Universe. Keeping Up with the Joneses Hedge funds came to prominence when Soros broke the Bank of England and the pound sterling on Black Wednesday, September 16, 1992.

David McNally “From financial crisis to world slump: accumulation, financialization, and the global slowdown” (15 December 2008), expanded version of a paper presented to the plenary session (“The global financial crisis: causes and consequences”), 2008 Historical Materialism Conference, University of London (http://marxandthefinancialcrisisof2008.blogspot.com/2008/12/david-mcnally-from-financial-crisis-to.html). 40. Alan Greenspan, Testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (23 October 2008). Chapter 15—Woodstock for Hedge Funds 1. Martin Baker (1995) A Fool and His Money, Orion Books, London: 157, 158. 2. Tom Wolfe (1988) The Bonfire of the Vanities, Picador, London: 64. 3. Tony Tassell “The Goldman Sachs narrative” (8 February 2010) Financial Times. 4. Quoted in Robert Slater (2009) Soros: The World’s Most Influential Investor, McGraw Hill, New Jersey: 178. 5. Philip Delves Broughton (2009) Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, Penguin Books, New York: 99. 6.

See also Warren Buffet Berle, Adolf, 54 Berlin Wall, fall of, 101, 295 Bernanke, Ben, 170, 182, 203, 303, 338, 366 debt, 267 Great Moderation, 277 on 60 Minutes, 343 September, 2008, 342 Bernstein, Peter, 26, 129, 208 Besley, Tim, 278 Best, George, 88 beta (market returns), 241 Beveridge Report, 47 Beveridge, Sir William, 47 Beyond Belief, 338 Bhagavad Gita, 339 Bhide, Amar, 312 BHP Billiton, 59 bias, 243 Bieber, Matthew, 198 Bierce, Ambrose, 326 Big Short, The, 198 Biggs, Barton, 99 Bild, 358 Billboard Top 100 Chart, 124 Billings, Josh, 233 billionaire drivel, 327 bills of exchange, 32 bimetallism, 26 bio-fuels, 334 Bird, John, 91, 320 Black Swan, The, 95, 126 Black Wednesday, 240 Black, Fischer, 121, 127 black-box trading, 242 Black-Scholes models, 120-122, 277 Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) option, 121 Blackrock, 170 Blackstone, 167, 325 Blackstone Group, The, 154, 318 Blair, Tony, 81 Blankfein, Lloyd, 239, 364 Blinder, Alan, 129 Blomkvist, Mikhael, 360 Bloomberg TV, 92 Bloomberg, Michael, 164 Bloomsbury group, 29 Blue Force, 264 Blumberg, Alex, 185 Boao Forum, 324 boards of directors, knowledge of business operations, 292-293 BOAT (Best of All Time), 228 Boesky, Ivan, 147, 244 Bogle, Jack, 123 Bohr, Niels, 101, 257 Boiler Room, 185 Bonanza, 31 Bond, James, 26 Bonderman, David, 154, 164, 318 bonds, 169 adjustable rate, 213 failure of securitization, 204-205 high opportunity, 143 insurance, 176 junk, 143, 145-146 Milken’s mobsters, 146-147 municipal, 211-214 PAC (planned amortization class), 178 ratings, 143, 282-285 securitization, 173 TAC (target amortization class), 178 TOBs (tender option bonds), 222 U.S. Treasury, 87, 174 VADM (very accurately defined maturity), 178 Bonfire of the Vanities, 239 bonuses, 317-318 books, financial, 96-98 boom and bust cycles, 305 Booth School of Business, 116 Borges, Jorge Luis, 210 Born, Brooksley, 300 borrowing levels, increase in, 265, 267-268 Boston Post, 34 Bottomley, Horatio, 89 Bourdieu, Pierre, 308 Bouton, Daniel, 227 Bowers, David, 357 Bowie Bonds, 168 Bowie, David, 157, 168, 186 Bowsher, Charles, 272 Boy, John, 330 BP (British Petroleum), Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 361 Braddock, Ben, 308 Brandenburg Gate, Ronald Reagan’s speech at, 101 Brazilian reals, 21 Breeden, Richard, 292, 296 Bretton Woods, 29-30 BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), 90 bridges, 150, 158 Bridgewater, 327 Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, 186 British Aluminum (BA), 57 British pound sterling, 22 Brodsky, Joseph, 44 brokers money, 22 mortgages, 186 Brown, Gordon, 81, 342, 347 Brown, Ian Harold, 35 Bryan, William Jennings, 26, 324 bubbles, 277-278 economies, 39, 54 end of, 329 price, 299 Buckely, Christopher, 98 budget deficits, 1970s, 104 Buffett, Warren, 154, 202, 276, 325-326 bonuses, 319 compensation, 316 derivatives, 211, 225, 236 end of bubble, 329 Financial Times, 206 Gen Re Securities, 231 GE stock, 344 hedge funds, 261 ownership percentage of Moody’s, 283 purchase of, 322 bugs, gold, 28 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 34 bullion, gold.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

.… Complexity and coupling only made deception easier and the consequences more extensive.” No doubt, Perrow has a point. There’s no shortage of bad behavior in the financial industry, and the excesses of the 1990s and 2000s only confirmed the Wall Street Master-of-the-Universe stereotype popularized by Tom Wolfe’s iconic The Bonfire of the Vanities.35 We’ll examine these bad behaviors in the next chapter. But isn’t the source of all accidents, normal and otherwise, human behavior? Through the lens of the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, we can see why the world of finance produces tight coupling, because in a highly competitive financial environment, firms naturally adapt to produce greater gains in efficiency and profit.

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ___. 1994. Naturalist. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books. ___. 1998. Consilience. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Winston, Patrick Henry. 2012. “The Right Way.” Advances in Cognitive Systems 1: 23–36. Wolfe, Tom. 1987. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolford, George, Michael B. Miller, and Michael Gazzaniga. 2000. “The Left Hemisphere’s Role in Hypothesis Formation.” Journal of Neuroscience 20: RC64. Woodward. Susan. 2009. “The Subprime Crisis of 2008: A Brief Background and a Question.” ASSA Session on Recent Financial Crises, January 3.

., 46–47 Australopithecus, 153 autism, 110–111 Automated Proprietary Trading (APT), 236, 237, 240 automated teller machines (ATMs), 400 automobile safety, 205 aviation safety, 85, 321, 379–383 Avnaim-Pesso, Liora, 166, 167 Awakenings (Sacks), 88 Azar, Pablo, 372 Bachelier, Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse, 18–20, 21, 234 back testing, 285 Ball, Lucille, 395 Bamberger, Gerry, 235–236 Bankers Trust, 320, 344 Bank of America, 386–387 Bank of England, 366–367 bank runs, 176 Barings Bank, 61 Barnea, Amir, 161 Baron-Cohen, Simon 111 Barrett, Majel, 396 Bartra, Oscar, 100 BATS Global Markets, 360 Bear Stearns, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 316, 317 Bechara, Antoine, 106 behavioral economics, 3, 6–7, 51, 71, 92, 220 Behavioral Investment Allocation Strategy (BIAS), 90 behavioral risk, 388–394 Beinhocker, Eric, 218 bell curve (Gaussian distribution), 22, 273 Benner, Samuel, 29 Benner’s Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices, 29 Benyamine, David, 60 Bernanke, Ben, 300 Bernoulli, Daniel, 57 Berns, Gregory, 97, 98 Berra, Yogi, 415 beta (measure), 232, 249, 251, 252, 268–269, 282 Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Ralston), 118 Beutler, Ernest, 419 Bezear Homes, 325 Biham, Eli, 238 Billio, Monica, 376 binary choice model, 190–199, 201–202, 220, 362 biodiversity, 148–149 biofeedback, 93 biological determinism, 170–172 Biological Economics (Lo and Zhang), 218 biotechnology, 401–410 birthday problem, 67–68 Bismarck, Otto von, 417 Biston betularia (peppered moth), 138–140, 141 Bitcoin, 356 Black, Fischer, 27, 97, 260, 274, 276, 356–357 Black-Scholes/Merton option pricing formula, 10, 27, 97, 211, 260, 356–357 Blinder, Alan, 7, 310 block trading, 235 Bloomberg terminals, 360 Bocskocsky, Andrew, 69 Bogle, John C., 6, 263–264, 265, 397, 398 bonds, 259, 409; for biotechnology, 407; government, 242, 249–250, 292; index funds for, 265 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 322 Bonner, John, 371 bonobo, 162 bonuses, 303–305 Bossaerts, Peter, 101 bounded rationality, 36, 208, 215; Adaptive Markets Hypothesis likened to, 188; applications of, 185, 217; criticisms of, 181–182, 209, 213–214; informational limits acknowledged by, 34; optimization contrasted with, 180, 183 Boyle, Danny, 118 bracketology, 64–65 brain size, 152–53 brainstem, 81 Breiter, Hans, 88–89 Brennan, Tom, 182, 190, 196–197, 198, 203, 220, 362, 369 Brexit referendum, 377 Brodmann, Korbinian, 76 broker-dealers, 304–308, 311, 376 Bronze Age, 163 Brosnan, Sarah F., 337 Brownian motion, 19, 211 Buck v.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

I don’t know whether it would lead to less crime. It feels like it might, if there is anything to the broken windows theory.45 What is clear, though, is that women no longer have to stand in long queues to collect water, there is less water-borne disease, and as a result children lose fewer days of school. In Bonfire of the Vanities, the novelist Tom Wolfe talks of his obscenely rich banker achieving ‘isolation’ from the chaos of New York. He could have been living in New York, London or Frankfurt for all the contact he had with people who were not in his rarefied stratum. For people with less money and privilege, and particularly for families, community is where life happens, death too.

Political Economy Research Institute – Working Paper Series. 2013; April(322). 32International Monetary Fund. World Economic Outlook October 2012: Coping with High Debt and Sluggish Growth. Washington DC: IMF, 2012. 33UCL Institute of Health Equity. Reducing the Number of Young People Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET). Public Health England, 2014. 34Wolfe T. The Bonfire of the Vanities. London: Vintage Books, 1987. 7 DO NOT GO GENTLE 1Gawande A. Being Mortal. London: Profile Books, 2014. 2United Nations Population Fund, HelpAge International. Ageing in the Twenty-First Century: A Celebration and A Challenge. New York: UNFPA, 2012, p. 33. 3Kinsella K, He W, U.S. Census Bureau.


pages: 408 words: 114,719

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, classic study, complexity theory, Eratosthenes, George Santayana, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, work culture

Sodomy was prosecuted as a capital crime; bankers and merchant princes were attacked for their extravagant luxuries and their indifference to the poor; gambling was suppressed, along with dancing and singing and other forms of worldly pleasure. The most memorable event of Savonarola’s turbulent years was the famous “Bonfire of the Vanities,” when the friar’s ardent followers went through the streets collecting sinful objects—mirrors, cosmetics, seductive clothing, songbooks, musical instruments, playing cards and other gambling paraphernalia, sculptures and paintings of pagan subjects, the works of ancient poets—and threw them onto an enormous blazing pyre in the Piazza della Signoria.

Aachen, 120 Aalen, 15 abbots, 29, 30, 31–32, 38, 42, 45–50, 106, 148, 163, 210 Abracadabra, 60–61 Abraham, 194 academies, 28, 59, 211 Accius, Lucius, 23–24 acediosus (apathetic), 25–26 Acheron, 52, 273n Adam, 105, 109 Adams, John, 263 adaptation, 189–90 Adimari, Alamano, 162 adultery, 98, 141, 143–44 Aeneid (Virgil), 52, 273n Aeschylus, 81, 280n Aesculapius, 180 afterlife, 6, 57, 75–76, 98, 99–100, 101, 150, 158, 159, 171, 183, 192–95, 220, 223, 230–32, 244, 260 Against the Hypocrites (Poggio), 147–49, 150 Agamemnon, 194 Agora, 276n agriculture, 38, 45, 66, 126, 191, 228, 275n, 279n–80n Albergati, Niccolò, 210 Alberti, Leon Battista, 9, 110, 127–28, 218 Albizzi family, 113, 301n Alcubierre, Rocque Joaquin de, 55 Alcuin, 121 Alexander of Ephesus, 85 Alexander the Great, 60 Alexander V, Pope, 159–60 Alexandria, 279n–80n, 282n Alexandrian Library, 86–94, 130–31, 275n, 279n–83n Alexandrian Museum, 93 Alfonso II, King of Naples, 153 algebra, 239 Allah, 282n–83n alphabetical order, 88 altars, 10, 89 Ammianus Marcellinus, 49, 89, 93 anatomy, 87, 99–100 Ancona, 125 angels, 10, 194–95 anger, 6, 75–76, 103, 105, 145–46, 150, 209, 285n Anglesey, Arthur Annesley, Earl of, 257–58, 260 animal sacrifices, 183, 298n annotations, 23, 88, 221, 248–49, 256, 306n Anthony, Saint, 68, 286n antipopes, 160, 205, 293n–94n see also John XXIII (Baldassare Cossa), Antipope antiquarianism, 123, 129, 208–9, 290n Antoninus Pius, Emperor of Rome, 273n Antony, Mark, 61, 281n apikoros (Epicurean), 101 Apis, 89 Apollo, 75, 99 Apologeticus (Tertullian), 284n “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (Montaigne), 246 apostles, 24, 217–18 apostolic secretary (secretarius domesticus), 141–42, 154, 155–58, 161, 170, 180, 181, 205–15, 221, 224, 269n Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 252–53 Arabs, 282n–83n Aragazzi, Bartolomeo de, 34–35, 44 Aramaic language, 97 archaeology, 54–59, 63–64 Archimedes, 87 architecture, 9, 110–11, 129, 151, 156 Aretino, Leonardo, 179 Arezzo, 34, 141 Ariosto, Ludovico, 9, 242 aristocracy, 14–20, 36, 44, 59–61, 93 Aristotelianism, 96, 252–53 Aristotle, 62, 69, 73, 83, 91, 96, 98, 252–53, 284n, 304n art, 9, 17, 39, 40, 59, 60, 70, 88, 104, 129 asceticism, 6, 37, 41, 94–97, 104–9, 195, 228, 244, 285n–86n Ass, The (Lucian), 217 Assayer, The (Galileo), 254–55 astronomy, 5–6, 8, 48, 87, 91, 92, 239 atheism, 183–84, 221, 239, 259, 261 Athens, 59, 75, 77, 78–79, 274n, 276n, 280n atomism, 5–6, 8, 46, 73–75, 82, 99, 101, 185–89, 198–201, 220–21, 237, 239, 242–43, 244, 249, 250–53, 254, 255–56, 258, 260, 261, 297n, 306n atonement, 105–6 Atticus, 85, 119 Attila, 11 Augustine, Saint, 43 Augustinians, 111 Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 48, 61, 275n Austria, 55, 163 Averroës, 117 Avignon, 293n Bacchus, 183 Bacon, Francis, 8, 243, 261 Baden, 173–76, 177 Baghdad, 38 Balbus, Quintus Lucilius, 69–70 banking, 21, 22, 113–14 Baptistry (Florence), 110 barbarians, 11, 24, 28, 49, 59, 94 Barbaro, Francesco, 180–81, 203, 268n Barberini, Maffeo, 254 Bari, 135 Bassus, Saleius, 23–24 Bay of Naples, 54–55 Beaufort, Henry (bishop of Winchester), 206–8 beauty, 1–2, 8–10, 11, 201–2, 228, 251, 260–61, 299n Benedict, Saint, 25–28, 97, 103 Benedict XIII, Antipope, 160, 205 Benedictine Rule, 25–28, 37, 272n Benedictines, 25–28, 37, 44, 107, 272n benefices, 147, 269n Bernardino, Saint, 128 Bethlehem, 95 Bibaculus, Marcus Furius, 23–24 Bible, 3, 24, 43, 46, 88, 89, 95–96, 97, 105, 166, 239, 250, 285n bibliomancy, 18–19 bibliomania, 19, 152–54, 131, 177 Bischhoff, Bernhard, 271n–72n bishops, 20, 36, 38, 135, 161, 162, 168–69, 210 Black Death, 113 Bobbio monastery, 271n–72n Boccaccio, Giovanni, 120, 124, 132–33, 144 Bohemia, 155, 166, 168 Boiardo, Matteo, 242 Bologna, 113, 143, 158, 159–60, 214, 226 Bologna, University of, 158 “Bonfire of the Vanities,” 219 Boniface, Saint, 44, 45–46 Boniface IX, Pope, 135, 158 book repairers, 84–85 books of hours, 17 bookworms, 30, 83–84, 93 Borgia, Cesare, 226 Botticelli, Sandro, 10, 202, 226, 242, 267n Bourbon dynasty, 55 Bracciolini, Filippo, 213 Bracciolini, Giovanni Battista, 213 Bracciolini, Giovanni Francesco, 213 Bracciolini, Guicco, 111–12, 113, 122, 141, 211 Bracciolini, Jacoba, 112 Bracciolini, Jacopo, 213 Bracciolini, Lucretia, 213 Bracciolini, Pietro Paolo, 213 Bracciolini, Poggio, see Poggio Bracciolini, Gian Francesco Bracciolini, Vaggia di Buondelmonti, 212–14, 301n Brancacci family, 126 Branda de Castiglione, 162 bribery, 139–40 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 110, 218 Bruni, Leonardo, 125–26, 133, 134, 159, 162, 172–73, 178, 205, 210, 216, 295n Bruno, Giordano, 10, 233–41, 242, 243, 250, 256 Brutus, 61 Bryaxis, 89 bubonic plague, 18 “Bugiale” (“Lie Factory”), 142, 210 Buondelmonti, Gino dei, 301n Buondelmonti, Vaggia di Gino, see Bracciolini, Vaggia di Buondelmonte Buondelmonti family, 113, 212, 301n bureaucrats, 85, 135–38, 157 burning at the stake, 172–73, 177–79, 240–41 Burton, Robert, 8 Byzantium, 126 Caesar, Julius, 61, 65, 79, 85, 89, 274n, 281n Caesarini, Giuliano, 210 Cairo, 38 calculus, 87 calfskin, 40 Caligula, Emperor of Rome, 48 calligraphy, 112–13, 115–16, 121, 130, 135, 155–56, 179 Calvin, John, 253 cameos, 129, 209 Campbell, James, 285n Campo dei Fiori, 240–41 candles, 41, 83, 158 canon law, 136–37, 158 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 278n capitalism, 114 Capponi family, 113 Capra, Bartolomeo della, 162–63 Caravaggio, 9 carbonized remains, 54–59, 63–64, 68, 77, 82 cardinals, 135, 161, 163, 165, 168, 169, 210, 293n Carmelites, 111 Caro, Rodrigo, 250 Carolingian minuscules, 115, 121 Carthage, 59, 85, 275n cartography, 239 Cassian, John, 26 Cassiodorus, 123 Castel St.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

A series of visions led him to prophesy everything from the French invasion of Italy to the appearance of a cross of gold above Jerusalem, and, critically, Christ’s return in a chariot, his wake strewn with heretics whose books had been burned and images smashed. Many of his predictions and fulminations ended up in his Compendium Revelationum (1495), which added that God had sent him to Florence “to cleanse his Church with a mighty scourge.” For several years up to 1497, Savonarola orchestrated his infamous “bonfires of the vanities” in the city’s main square, the Piazza della Signoria, which were fueled by the books of Plato, Ovid, Dante, and Boccaccio, as well as chessboards, dice, harps, wigs, and less-than-decent images of the Virgin Mary. All were immolated as trumpets blared and children sang. Savonarola’s followers broke into houses to confiscate many of these “vanities,” but others were tossed onto the fires by their owners and creators, most tragically by the painter Sandro Botticelli.

See also Constitution (US) Bird’s Head Haggadah, 19 birth control, censorship of literature on, 10, 35, 145, 152, 162–63 The Birth of a Nation (film), 239 The Birth of Venus (Botticelli), 63 Black, Hugo, 212 Black Consciousness Movement (South Africa), 203–4 “Black Hawk Down” incident, 199–200 Black Lives Matter, 224, 253 Blackstone, William, 83–84, 91 blasphemy, 18, 95, 126–27, 129–30. See also religious censorship Blyth, Herbert, 161 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 62 Bolsonaro, Jair, 217, 223 Bond, Julian, 210 “bonfires of the vanities,” 62–63 Boniface VIII (pope), 61 book burning: in Ancient Greece, 24–25; in Ancient Rome, 10, 31–34, 36, 40, 48, 50–51; in Brazil, 203; in Chile, 203; in China, 1–2; in early Christianity, 42–44; in England, 88, 94, 101, 152; of Florentines, 61–63; in France, 90; in Germany, 187; of Jewish texts, 15–16, 30, 58–60, 73, 188; by Roman Catholic Church, 69, 72; in US, 87–88, 160.


pages: 423 words: 126,096

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

The FBI is able to identify 70 percent of the footwear impressions it receives, according to the former head of its footwear unit, William J. Bodziak.5 Sneakers are as suited for self-assertion as for flight. The bouncing and dragging “pimp walk” was a staple of black exploitation films of the 1960s and early 1970s, just before the sneaker explosion. In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities, youthful black defendants in the Bronx County Courthouse defy officialdom with the pimp walk’s successor, an insolent gait called the “pimp roll,” a “pumping swagger” that another writer, a London journalist, has described as “that swaying, strutting way you walk when your soles are bouncy and your ankles supported”—a gait less feasible in sandals than in running shoes.

Bodziak, Footwear Impression Evidence (New York: Elsevier, 1990); Andrea Codrington, “Technology and Design Run Wild in the Soles of the Newest Sneakers,” New York Times, November 6, 1997. 6. John W. Fountain, “Noted with … Pride; Way Black When,” Washington Post, July 25, 1999; Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 110; William Leith, “Pump It Up,” The Independent (London), July 8, 1990. 7. Michelle Higgins, “The Ballet Shoe Gets a Makeover, but Few Yet See the Pointe,” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 1998. 8. Wolfgang Decker, “Die Lauf-Stele des Königs Taharka,” Kölner Beiträge zur Sportwissenschaft, vol. 13 (1984), 7–37; E.


pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

I’m sitting beside a dealer in US Treasurys in a crowded midtown Manhattan office. He has bought and sold Treasurys (the sovereign debt securities of the United States) for more than thirty years, and vividly describes to me the teeming, raucous bond-trading room of the investment bank Salomon Brothers in its heyday at the end of the 1980s. It was the world of The Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe 1988) and Liar’s Poker (Lewis 1990). The dealer, interviewee YA, had work to do that afternoon as well as stories to tell. The role of the dealer is an old one: selling securities to clients such as institutional investors, buying them from clients, and unwinding the trading positions thus taken on by trading with other dealers.

“Germany Scrambles to Shut the Door on Mifid Open Access.” Available at https://www.risk.net/regulation/7196266/germany-scrambles-to-shut-the-door-on-mifid-open-access, accessed January 16, 2020. Wolf, Martin. 2019. “Saving Capitalism from the Rentiers.” Financial Times, September 18: 9. Wolfe, Tom. 1988. The Bonfire of the Vanities. London: Cape. Wolkoff, Neal L., and Jason B. Werner. 2010. “The History of Regulation of Clearing in the Securities and Futures Markets, and Its Impact on Competition.” Review of Banking and Financial Law 30/1: 313–81. Young, Kevin. 2015. “Not by Structure Alone: Power, Prominence, and Agency in American Finance.”


pages: 970 words: 302,110

A Man in Full: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, hiring and firing, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South of Market, San Francisco, walking around money

It has complex characters, a storyline that keeps you guessing, and the kind of writing that makes you want to take your TV out in the back yard and pulverize it with a sledgehammer." —The Orlando Sentinel "A Man in Full is bound to take the nation by storm.... If Wolfe's previous novel, 1987s The Bonfire of the Vanities, is ever knocked off its pedestal as America's finest work of contemporary fiction, A Man in Full will be what does it." —Naples Daily News, Naples, FL "His most deeply felt, most unabashedly literal’)' book, imbued with more compassion than satire... Timeless and resonant." —The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC "A big, complex interweaving of characters to love, to hate, to marvel at, to be appalled by, to recognize as peers in our humans-with-faults parade through life ...

—The Star-Ledger, Newark Also by Tom Wolfe The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaffe Streamline Baby The Pump House Gang The Electric Kool-AidAcid Test Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flal( Catchers The Painted Word Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine The Right Stuff In Our Time From Bauhaus to Our House The Bonfire of the Vanities Hooding Up With immense admiration the author dedicates A Man in Full to PAUL McHUCH whose brilliance, comradeship, and unfading fondness saved the day. This book would not exist had it not been for you, dear friend. And the author wants to express a gratitude beyond measure to MACK AND MARY TAYLOR who opened his eyes to the wonders of Atlanta and the Georgia plantation country and gave him the run of their vast storehouse of knowledge and insights, all with a hospitality he will never forget.

And the author wants to express a gratitude beyond measure to MACK AND MARY TAYLOR who opened his eyes to the wonders of Atlanta and the Georgia plantation country and gave him the run of their vast storehouse of knowledge and insights, all with a hospitality he will never forget. The author bows deeply to JANN WENNER the generous genius who walked this boo/( along until it found its feet, just as he did The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Ambush at Fort Bragg. KAILEY WONG whose eye for the telling details of contemporary American life is unsurpassed and whose help, once more, has been invaluable. TOMMY PHIPPS whose walks on the beach with the author never failed to generate the necessary new approach and the joie de vivre to try it.


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

(Sandy Weill, it can be argued, was somewhat cavalier in his choice of Salomon as the investment bank that would take Travelers to the next level. Building a top-tier investment bank is more difficult than merely making a turnkey purchase.) Finally, there was the issue of culture. Salomon’s “Big Swinging Dicks” had been lampooned in Tom Wolfe’s popular 1987 book Bonfire of the Vanities (in which Wolfe coined the term “Masters of the Universe”) and in Michael Lewis’s 1989 insider account Liar’s Poker. Both books had painted a culture in which the client was viewed more as prey than partner, and the Treasury bond scandal had revealed a moral vacuum at the top levels of the firm.

., 47–48 American Credit Indemnity, 39 American Express (Amex), 15, 19–26, 27, 29, 31, 35, 37, 66, 71, 98, 106, 134, 137, 138, 186, 208, 278, 323 Andrews, Suzanna, 95 Anheuser-Busch, 305 AT&T, 158 auction-rate securities, 276–77, 290 auto leasing, 27, 31–32, 39, 159, 194 Avis Rent-A-Car, 27 Baca, Carlos, 222 Bache Halsey Stuart Shields, 19 Bachelder, Joseph, 148 Bair, Sheila, ix–x, 292, 293, 294, 300 balance sheets, 32, 39, 44–45, 47, 156, 160, 189, 192–93, 196–97, 198, 206, 209, 227, 238, 240, 272, 278, 310, 320, 323 Ballmer, Steve, 181 Banc One, 103, 143–45 Bankers Trust, 89 bank holding companies, 285, 287–88 Bank Investment Consultant, 151 Bank of America, ix, 27–30, 103, 147, 170, 174, 197, 204, 219, 222, 224–25, 229, 232, 238, 251, 274, 282, 286, 289, 295, 299–300, 302, 306, 310, 316, 318, 320 Bank of Manhattan, 202, 203 Bank of New York, 103, 202, 216, 238, 261, 283, 296 Bank One, 143–51, 162, 167, 171–201, 204, 209, 220, 238–39, 261, 273, 291, 293 Barbarians at the Gate (Burrough and Helyar), 28, 52 Barclays Bank PLC, 52–53, 138, 282, 283 Barron’s, 155, 168 Baruch, Bernard, 45 Beacon Group, 172, 174 Bear Stearns, ix, 17, 19, 53, 112, 166, 204–5, 214, 216, 223–28, 230, 232, 240, 241, 243–74, 275, 277, 278, 279, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 294, 297, 300, 301, 306–7, 311, 317, 321, 326 Beeson, Mark, 165 Bergman, Shelley, 270 Berkshire Hathaway, 27, 37, 190–91, 227, 231–32 Berlind, Roger, 17 Bernanke, Ben, 89, 205, 230, 244, 247, 273, 285, 288, 300 Bewkes, Jeff, 243 Bezos, Jeff, 138 Bialkin, Kenneth, 46, 184 Bibliowicz, Jessica Weill, 7, 78–83, 96, 127–28, 186, 194 Bisignano, Frank, 116, 166, 200, 239, 290, 299 Black, Debbie, 118–19, 247, 249 Black, Steve, 51, 59, 61, 66, 68, 77, 96, 118–20, 125–26, 133, 151, 163, 172, 176–77, 188, 189, 191, 199, 200, 217, 218, 225, 234, 235, 239, 242, 247–57, 262, 271, 278–81, 282, 286, 315 Blackstone Group, 138 Blank, Arthur, 139 Blankfein, Lloyd, 221, 244, 275, 282, 300 Blockbuster Entertainment, 69–70 Blodget, Henry, 164 Bloomberg, Michael, 251–52 Bludhorn, Charlie, 17 BNP Paribas, 226, 283 Boesky, Ivan, 27 Boisi, Geoffrey, 172 bonds, 10, 20, 21, 32, 33, 34, 52, 53, 57, 73, 84, 90, 91, 109, 114, 182, 196, 200–206, 238, 254–55, 277, 297, 308 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 92 bonuses, 39, 69, 156, 165, 195, 214, 216 Bookstaber, Richard, 107–8, 109, 113, 130, 199 Booz Allen Hamilton, 12 Boshart, Jim, 68, 77, 149–50, 166, 176–77 Boston Consulting Group, 8 Bove, Dick, 131, 195, 196, 277 Braunstein, Doug, 176, 253–54, 255, 258, 281 Brenneman, Greg, 137, 168 British Telecommunications, 96 broad index secured trust offering (BISTRO), 210–11 Brookfield Asset Management, 219 Brooks, John, 231 Brown & Co., 216 Browning School, 3–5, 6, 10, 62 Brysam Global Partners, 207 Budd, Ed, 58, 70 Buffett, Warren, xi, 25–26, 27, 37, 91–94, 135, 136, 160, 190–91, 201, 227, 231–32, 258–59, 323, 327 Burke, Stephen, 9–11, 15, 25, 81, 139, 149 Burner, Paul, 31 Burnett, Erin, 316 Burr, Aaron, 202 Burrough, Bryan, 28, 52, 226 Bush, George W., 205, 278, 301, 317 Bushnell, Dave, 111 Business Week, 53, 71, 72, 75, 84, 85, 89–90, 95, 124, 131, 134, 151, 194, 197–98, 224, 324 Buyers-Russo, Jane, 281–82 Califano, Joseph, 49, 75–76, 135 Calvano, James, 27, 34, 37, 59, 150 Campbell, William, 104, 107, 111–12, 139, 142, 150, 186, 215 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), 6 capital markets, 20, 51, 53, 61, 68, 83, 107–14, 277, 294 capital reserves, 44–45, 46, 48, 131 Capp, Al, 67 Carpenter, Mike, 98, 100–101, 120, 122, 125–26, 163 “Cars for Cons” program, 31–32 Carter, Arthur, 17 Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill (CBPW), 17 Carter, Jimmy, 49 Carter, Linda, 17 Cassano, Joseph, 211 Cavanagh, Emily, 151–52 Cavanagh, Michael, 62, 84, 149, 150, 151–52, 180, 186, 208, 239, 240, 242, 246, 247, 248, 252, 253, 254, 256, 259, 260, 265, 290, 292, 293, 294–95, 298, 319, 326 Cayne, James, 112, 166, 221, 226, 228, 241, 258, 265, 268, 269, 304, 323, 325 CBS Marketwatch, 151 CBWL-Hayden Stone, 17–18 Chase, Salmon P., 202–3 Chase Home Finance, 235, 291 Chase Manhattan, 89, 135, 162, 171–73, 194, 199–204 Chase National Bank, 202–3 Chemical Bank, 36, 41, 57, 59, 89, 145, 171, 203 Chenault, Ken, 244 Cherasia, Peter, 270 Chernow, Ron, 52, 87, 202, 203, 260 Chicago Sun-Times, 153 Chief Executive, 163 Cioffi, Ralph, 223–26, 231 Citadel Investment Group, 217–18, 268, 285–86 CITIC, 228 Citicorp, 54–55, 98–101 Citigroup, 83, 98–150, 155, 160–68, 177, 178, 183–84, 185, 195, 196, 200–209, 214, 219, 220, 221, 228–30, 232, 238, 240, 251, 269, 276, 280, 289, 295–303, 310, 316, 321, 323, 324, 325 City National Bank, 143 Clinton, Bill, 87, 103, 140, 221 Clinton, Hillary, 241, 316 CNBC, 84, 227, 245, 249, 302 CNN, 196 Cogan, Marshall, 19 Cohan, William, 224, 244, 258, 262 Cohen, H.


pages: 385 words: 128,358

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

After a while, I started thinking, “Is this what I want to do with my life?” I looked at my friends’ careers, and the people who liked their lives the most were the proprietary traders. I started spending my spare time in upstate New York reading finance stuff: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Bonfire of the Vanities, Market Wizards, Money Masters—anything I could get my hands on. My game plan was to go to business school; get a job in proprietary trading; work 10 years on the sell side developing my knowledge, experience, contacts, and track record; and then make a move to the buy side. I applied to a bunch of business schools and was offered a fellowship at the University of North Carolina (UNC).

See also Central bank(s)/banking Bank of Canada, 285 Bank of England, 14–15, 113, 152, 161, 166, 175, 274–275, 285 Bank of Japan, 175, 318 Bank paper, 141 Barclays Capital, 134–139, 141, 153 Barings Singapore, 80 Barron’s, 231, 238 Baruch, Bernard, 146–147 Bear/bearish markets, 82–83, 123, 157, 225, 228, 230, 237, 340 Beauty contest, 164–165 Behavioral finance, 152, 159 Bernanke, Ben, 350 Bessent, Scott, 14, 16, 20, 269–288 Bessent Capital, 269 Beta, 8, 282, 328 BHP Billiton, 252 Bid/offer spreads, 45, 61 Big-bet approach, 341–343 Black box trading systems, 332 Black Monday, 11, 212–213 Black Wednesday 1992, 10, 14–17, 29, 114, 275 361 362 Blodgett, Henry, 260 Bond investments, 61, 88, 118, 121–122, 146–147, 157–158, 231, 251 Bond market, 61, 78, 145, 149–151, 193, 225–226, 292, 323, 328 Bond market rout of 1994, 10, 17, 155 Bond prices, 204 Bond rally, 75 Bond specialists, 127 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 244 Boom-bust cycle, 167–168 Bosnia, 51 Bottom-up approach, 51, 346 Brady bonds, 296 Brazil/Brazilian real,193, 204, 208–209, 239, 261, 290, 295–296, 327–328, 334–335 Bretton Woods, 6–7, 90, 123, 201 British pound, 14–16, 76, 117, 209, 221–222, 274, 285. See also Sterling Brown Brothers, 271 BTPs (Buoni del Tesoro Poliennali), 85–87 Bucket shops, 36 Buffett,Warren, 278, 292 Bull/bullish market, 83, 107, 123, 217, 225–226, 228, 230–231, 239, 273 Bund/BTP convergence trade, 85–87 Bundesbank, 14 Bunds, 75, 340 Business cycle, global, 328–329 Butterfly options, 46 Buy and hold strategy, 7, 47 Buy low, sell high, 228–229 Buy signals, 226 Call options, 85 Canada, 167 Canadian dollar, 67, 239, 286 Capital allocation, 24, 33, 98–99, 315, 321 Capital preservation, 144, 323–324 Carry trades, 78–79, 110–111, 113, 117–118, 125, 134 Cash market, 85 Caxton, 9–10, 33 Central bank(s)/banking, 32, 40, 83, 139–140, 148, 151–153, 161–162, 167–170, 204, 313, 331 Central banker(s), 13–14, 160, 229, 349.


pages: 474 words: 136,787

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, feminist movement, Gregor Mendel, invention of agriculture, language acquisition, Menlo Park, phenotype, rent control, the long tail, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, University of East Anglia, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In a good year for mice, a male can catch so many mice that he can simultaneously give two females the impression that he is a fine male; he can provide each with more mice than he could catch for one in a normal year.36 Nordic forests seem to be full of deceitful adulterers, for a similar habit by a deceptively innocent-looking little bird led to a long-running dispute in the scientific literature of the 1980s. Some male pied flycatchers, in the forests of Scandinavia, manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it, like the owls or like Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, who keeps an expensive wife on Park Avenue and a beautiful mistress in a rent-controlled apartment across town. Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing that the male is unmarried.

., 224 Bernstein, Harris, 41–4 Betzig, Laura, 120, 191–4, 232 Bilharzia, 72, 78 Birds concealed ovulation among, 223 mating systems of, 209, 213–16, 219 parasites of, 146–7 sex chromosomes in, 116–17 sexual selection in, 133–7, 138–9, 158 See also specific species Birds of paradise, 143–4 Birkhead, Tim, 214, 215, 219 Blind Watchmaker, The (Dawkins), 15 Bloom, Paul, 318, 321 Bodmer, Walter, 81 Bogart, Humphrey, 199 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 225 Bonobos, 208–9, 222 Borgia, Cesare, 273 Bosnia, 198 Botticelli, Sandro, 272, 280 Bounty (ship), 195 Bowerbirds, 143, 158 Boyce, Mark, 147 Brain critical period and, 276–7 of dolphins, 299–300 gender differences in, 239 hormones and, 246–50, 255–6 mechanisms of, 311–13 neoteny and, 316–18 progression in size of, 300–303 toolmaking and, 313–14 Brain Sex (Moir and Jessel), 247 Bremermann, Hans, 71–2, 73, 74 Brooks, Lisa, 28 Brown, Don, 198 Buddha, 21 Budding, 48 Burley, Nancy, 117, 160, 216, 223 Burt, Austin, 59–60, 68–9, 83 Buss, David, 259–60, 265, 290 Butler, Samuel, 127 Byrne, Richard, 324–5 Caesar, Julius, 193, 325 Caligula, 193, 273 Carotenoids, 151, 159 Carroll, Lewis, 2 Catherine of Aragon, 233 Catholic Church, 222 controversies with state, 232–3 Cattle breeding, 119 Chaffinches, 277–8 Chagnon, Napoleon, 196–7 Chemical defence, 68 Chimpanzees, 6–7, 206–9, 211–12 intelligence of, 325–6 power seeking among, 188 promiscuity of, 205 toolmaking by, 313 violence of, 196 China ancient, 191, 192, 199 female infanticide in, 117, 122 harem polygamy in, 186 marriage customs in, 275 Chlamydomonas, 97, 98 Chloroplasts, 96–7 Chomsky, Noam, 304, 311, 318 Chromosomes, 29, 42, 43, 90 crossovers on, 60 jumping genes and, 91–2 parasitic, 69 selfish, 92 sex, 95, 105–10, 116–18, 256, 271 swapping of chunks of, 94–5 Claudius, 193 Clutton-Brock, Tim, 112 Coalitions of males, 189–90 Coelacanth, 31, 60 Cognitive approach, 311 Cohen, Fred, 66–7 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 308 Commons, tragedy of, 87, 122 Communication, 321–3 Competition, 62, 63, 89–90 diversity and, 57–8 female, 224 sexual selection and, 129, 132 within species, 33–4 testicular size and, 214 violence and, 195 Complexity, 15 Computer viruses, 66–7 Concealed ovulation, 222–4 Conditioning, 172, 244 Conflict, 17–19 Conjugation, 91, 98 Connectionism, 310 Connor, Richard, 189, 326 Contingent history, 17 Coolidge, Calvin, 290 Cooperation, 17–19 among genes, 88–90 individual selection and, 36 reciprocity as key to, 74 Corals, 55–6 Cortisol, 151, 247, 256 Cosmides, Leda, 96, 106, 267, 303, 311, 321, 323, 324, 329 Cott, Hugh, 131 Courtly love, 232 Courtship, 128, 129, 150, 163, 164 competition and, 132–3 Cousins, marriage between, 234 Critical period, 276–8 Cronin, Helena, 138 Crook, John, 321 Crossing over, 94–5, 122 Crow, James, 32, 48 Cytomegalovirus, 99 Dahomey, 168 Daly, Martin, 227–8 Dart, Raymond, 314 Darwin, Charles, 6, 8, 9, 14, 19, 27, 31–3, 36, 58, 61, 130–32, 134, 135, 138, 143, 158, 214, 241, 295, 301, 319 Darwin, Erasmus, 24, 232 Darwinian history, 235–6 Dawkins, Marian, 154, 156 Dawkins, Richard, 9, 15, 63, 65, 92, 118–19, 153, 323 Deep structure of language, 304 Deer, 180 Democracy, 199 Descartes, René, 306 Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin), 130 Despotism, 191–3, 199, 200, 203, 264 Determinism, 252–5 Diamond, Jared, 143, 208 Dickemann, Mildred, 121, 190 Dio, 193 Dionysus effect, 328 Diploidy, 43, 44, 93 Disease theory, 73–6 Dispersal, 54 Division of labour, sexual, 242, 243, 251, 253–4 Divorce, 264–5 DNA, 29, 40, 42, 43–4, 50 discovery of, 8–9 insertions of, 49 parasitic, 92 in sex chromosomes, 116 Dogs, 317 Dolphins, 189, 212, 299–300 Dominance beauty and, 295–6 biased sex ratios and, 112–15, 119–20 and cultural gender bias, 120–22 inheritance of, 230–31 personality and, 289–90 sexual selection and, 143–4 wealth and, 187–8 Dörner, Gunter, 256 Douglas firs, 77 Dunbar, Robin, 206 Durkheim, Emil, 307, 322, 339 Eals, Marion, 243 Ecology, 41, 43–4, 54–61, 62–3, 76–7 intelligence and, 319–20 mating systems and, 180–86 Education, gender differences and, 249 Egypt, ancient, 191 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 234 Eliot, George, 322 Ellis, Bruce, 260, 261, 263, 289, 296 Ellis, Havelock, 294 Elm trees, 56 Endler, John, 158 Environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), 184–6 Ericsson, Roland, 116 ‘Essay on Man, An’ (Pope), 336 Eugenics, 295, 307 Evolution of Sex (Maynard Smith), 40 Exogamy, 113, 114, 182–3 Extinction 61 Extra-pair copulation (EPC), 214 Facial features, 282–8 Fallon, April, 293 Fantasies, sexual, 261–3 Fashion, status and, 291–4 Fat distribution, 154–6 Fei-ti, 192, 199 Felix Holt, the Radical (Eliot), 322 Felsenstein, Joe, 83 Feminism, 252–5 Finches, 160, 246–7 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, 250 Fisher, Helen, 264 Fisher, Ronald, 31, 32, 35, 119, 122, 134–5, 138–42, 143, 159, 281, 288, 330 Flaubert, Gustave, 216 Flax, 71 Flour beetles, 92 Flycatchers, 225 Foley, Robert, 182–4 Foragers, see Hunter-gatherers Ford, Henry, 320 Fossils, 60, 61 of human ancestors, 183, 301, 317 Fox, Robin, 307 Frank, Steve, 93 Free will, 4, 5, 7 Freud, Sigmund, 273–6, 308, 322, 339 Frogs, 156–7 Fruit flies, 93–4, 142, 173 Fungi, 68, 84 bacteria and, 68, 69 Fusion sex, 97–9 Galton, Francis, 287, 339 Game theory, 177, 180, 213 //Gana San people, 187 Gender(s), 13, 87–123 asymmetry between, 171–5 choosing, 122 cultural preference patterns for, 120–22 determination of, 95, 105–10 dominance and, 112–15, 119–20 hermaphroditism versus, 100–103 mentality and, 239–67 and organelles, 96–8, 100–103 parasites altering, 104–5 selling, 115–20 Generations, length of, 68–9 Genes, 8–9, 16, 31–3 altruism and, 36 asexual, 38 of bacteria, 68, 90–91 behaviour and, 306–7, 309 and competition within species, 34 cooperation between, 19, 88–95 crossing over of, 94–5 in defence against parasites, 64 definition of, 29 gender and, 88, 100 histocompatibility, 72–3 homosexuality and, 255–7, 271–2 hormones and, 246 jumping, 82, 91–2 kin selection and, 74 meiotic-drive, 94 mental differences and, 244 mixing of, 30, 53 mutations and, 44–50 neoteny, 330–32 in organelles, 96–8, 100–103 for ornamentation, 140 parliament of, 95, 123 polymorphism and, 69–71, 81 racial differences and, 12–13 repair of, 41–4, 49–50, 60, 83 resistance, 75, 81–2 selfish, 92–4 sex and, 12–13 sex-linked, 330 for sexual reproduction, 36–7 sexual selection and, 136, 137 and tangled bank theory, 59–60 Genetics, 40–41, 42, 44–50 Genome, 29 ‘Gentle Echo on Woman, A’ (Swift), 202 Germanic tribes, 195 Ghiselin, Michael, 36–7, 38, 57 Gibbons, 206, 207 Gibbon, Edward, 193 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 323–4 Goodall, Jane, 114, 188, 207, 325 Gonadotrophin, 118 Gordian, 193 Gorillas, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212 intelligence of, 320 Goshawks, 222 Gosling, Morris, 117 Gould, Stephen Jay, 38–9, 306, 309, 316, 317 Grackles, 160 Gradualism, 60 Grafen, Alan, 93–5 Grant, Valerie, 115, 118 Greece, ancient, 197 Group selection, 34–6, 69 Grouse, 136, 137, 139, 147, 181–2 Guilford, Tim, 154, 156 Guppies, 134, 158–9 Gynodioecious plants, 101 Haig, David, 93–5, 271–2 Haldane, J.


pages: 457 words: 143,967

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market by Philip Augar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business logic, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, family office, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, light touch regulation, loadsamoney, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Sloane Ranger, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, vertical integration, wikimedia commons, yield curve

Anyone in the middle levels and above in investment banking earns enough money to live a different life from that lived by other people of their age: bigger houses, more exotic holidays, nicer clothes, better restaurants, priority lines at airports, the best hotels. The power is alluring too. You are at the centre of the action, working with dynamic people in an electric environment. You meet corporate chief executives, big investors and people from Washington. Tom Wolfe wrote of the hubristic Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities: ‘On Wall Street he and a few others – how many? Three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? – had become precisely that … Masters of the Universe.’1 Diamond was no Sherman McCoy but he was in the upper reaches of the real life top 300 and it was both too late and too soon to return to the quiet life.

‘New buy-back by Barclays after 15% profit rise’, Irish Times, 7 August 1996 14. Kirstie Hamilton, ‘Barclays chiefs called to account’, Sunday Times, 4 October 1998 5. A Dark Night in Essex, 1995 1. Securities Industry Association, Securities Industry Fact Book 2006, p. 31 6. The Dumb Money, 1996 1. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Pan Books, London, 1988, p. 19 7. In Memoriam BZW, 1997 1. Andrew Lorenz, BZW: The First Ten Years, BZW, London, 1996, p. 191 2. Barclays Annual Report 1996, p. 81 3. Financial Times, 4 October 1997 4. Barclays confirms sale agreement with CSFB, Barclays press release, 12 November 1997 5.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

And I think this is an American problem … this advertising, you got to have this, you got to have the newest, the latest, the best, and so on—and that is, I think, an American problem.” Overspending is certainly not the exclusive province of the poor. Tom Wolfe, capturing the opposite side of Horatio Alger’s America, deftly caricatures the foibles of the affluent. “I’m already going broke on a million dollars a year!” the bond trader screams to himself in The Bonfire of the Vanities: The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he had thought of it at the time— and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden—that was all!

., New York Times, Mar. 26,1999, p. Ci. 10. Consumer Reports, January 2001, pp. 20–24. 11. Geraldine Fabrikant, New York Times, Dec. 3, 2000, Section 3, p. 17. 12. Vivienne Hodges and Stuart Margulies, Stanford çth Language Arts Coach Grade 4 (New York: Educational Design, 1998). 13. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 142–43. Chapter Two: Work Doesn’t Work 1. Alan Weil and Kenneth Finegold, Welfare Reform: The Next Act (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2002). Introduction at http://www.urban.org/pubs/welfare_reform/intro.html. 2. Robert Lerman, “Single Parents’ Earnings Monitor,” Urban Institute, Oct. 26, 2001, and Dec. 26, 2002, available at www.urban.org. 3.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

She is engaged to a young, ambitious Wall Street trader with goals much like Gekko himself had when he became involved in chicanery resembling much of what has contributed to many of this country’s financial problems in the twenty-first century.94 Like the original Wall Street and other films such as the 1980s classic Bonfire of the Vanities, Wall Street 2 highlights price-tag framing: everything (and everybody) has a price, and the higher the price, the greater the zeal with which people will pursue wealth and power at any cost. 9781442202238.print.indb 48 2/10/11 10:46 AM Twenty-Four-Karat Gold Frames 49 Not only does price-tag framing tell media audiences how much the rich pay for their possessions, but it also may suggest that ordinary people can live like millionaires, even if on a reduced scale.

., 7 Berroa, Anna, 96–97 The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and Their Families (Shulman), 158 Betty Crocker, 172 The Beverly Hillbillies, 142 Biagi, Shirley, 223 Biden, Joseph, 175 Biel, Jessica, 114 Blair, Henry William, 127 Blakely, Edward J., 207, 208 Blasi, Gary, 93 Bloom, Orlando, 76 Bloomberg, Michael R., 32, 33 Blue Collar TV, 146 Bobos in Paradise (Brooks), 165–66, 206 The Bold and the Beautiful, 57 Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), 48 Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Schor), 217 Boston Globe, 60 Boston Med, 10 Bourdieu, Pierre, 34 BP oil spill, 16, 30, 137, 139, 216 9781442202238.print.indb 290 Bradley-Martins, charitable activities, 25 Branson, Richard, 62 Brathwaite, Kim, 95–96 Bravo, 12–13, 44 Bricklayers Protective Union, 125 Brittain, Deborah C., 27 Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.


pages: 453 words: 132,400

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, fear of failure, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vilfredo Pareto

First of all, wandering in the dark forest, Dante realizes that three fierce beasts are stalking him, licking their chops in anticipation. They are a lion, a lynx, and a she-wolf—representing, among other things, ambition, lust, and greed. As for the contemporary protagonist of one of the bestsellers of 1988, the middle-aged New York bond trader in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Dante’s nemesis turns out to be the desire for power, sex, and money. To avoid being destroyed by them, Dante tries to escape by climbing a hill. But the beasts keep drawing nearer, and in desperation Dante calls for divine help. His prayer is answered by an apparition: it is the ghost of Virgil, a poet who died more than a thousand years before Dante was born, but whose wise and majestic verse Dante admired so much that he thought of the poet as his mentor.

Therapeutic processes in a yoga ashram. American Journal of Psychotherapy 39:253–62. ——. In press. Personal growth in a yoga ashram: A social psychological analysis. The social scientific study of religion, vol. 2. Wittfogel, K. 1957. Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wolfe, T. 1987. The bonfire of the vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus. Wood, E. 1954. Great system of yoga. New York: Philosophical Library. Wundt, W. 1902. Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, vol. 3. Leipzig. Wynne, E. A. 1978. Behind the discipline problem: Youth suicide as a measure of alienation. Phi Delta Kappan 59:307–15.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

We all know the rubble scenes of tenement skeletons and ragged mattresses, hydrants dribbling like busted faucets, abandoned cars with the guts ripped out. Street gangs with their names stitched on the backs of denim vests: BLACK SPADES, SAVAGE SKULLS, GHETTO BROTHERS. The South Bronx as war zone. Shocked, awed, and blitzed. In the 1980s it’s where Tom Wolfe’s yuppies took a wrong turn in Bonfire of the Vanities. And where the urban wasteland harbored supernatural killer wolves in Wolfen—a movie “set during a critical moment in the collapse of radical politics and the emergence of a feral neoliberalism, against a backdrop of urban dereliction and redevelopment,” says Jeff Kinkle in his online essay “Neoliberalism as Horror: Wolfen and the Political Unconscious of Real Estate.”

., 27 Auletta, Ken, 105 AVA High Line, 240, 242–43 AvalonBay Communities, 91–92, 240, 242 Avalon Bowery, 91–92 Avalon Chrystie Place, 91–92 Baby Dee, 25, 360 Baby strollers, 230, 329–30 Baccarat Hotel & Residences, 182–83 Bachom, Sandi, 127 Bacon’s Rebellion, 61 Badalucco, Michael, 29 Badillo, Herman, 77–78 Bagatelle, 190–91 Bailey, Marlene (“Hot Dog”), 25 Balazs, André, 94 Baldwin, James, 65, 66 Ballarò, 21–22 B&H Dairy, 31 Bank of America Tower, 266 Banksy, 403 Barad, Ulo, 275–78 Barclays Center, 352, 353–54 Bard, Stanley, 216, 223 Barnes, Djuna, 130, 140 Barnes & Noble, 18 Barney, Matthew, 187 Barrison, Steven, 283 Barron, James, 51 Barry, Dan, 95, 167, 264–65, 364 Bartkoff, Regina, 51 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 87, 95 Baum, Dan, 74 Bay Ridge, 354, 355 Beame, Abraham, 76, 78, 249–50 Beast of the Feast, 126, 146 Beatrice Inn, 143 Becker, Serge, 87–89 Bedford-Atlantic Armory, 347 Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), 161, 343–45 Bellafante, Ginia, 256 Bella’s Luncheonette, 121 Bellevue South, 22 Bendix Diner, 219 Benepe, Adrian, 252 Berger, Joseph, 394 Berman, Marshall, 131, 392 Berrigan, Ted, 86 Bike lanes, 324, 340 Bill’s Gay 90s, 146 Biography Bookshop, 174 Blackburn, Paul, 358 Black Lives Matter, 325, 416 Blandalism, 232 Blarney Cove, 26 Bleecker Street, 171–76 Blesh, Rudi, 88 Bliss, George, 88 Blockbusting, 68–69 Bloomberg, Michael, 7, 8, 39, 155–67, 179, 205 Bronx and, 393–94 Brooklyn and, 337, 344, 346, 348, 350, 352, 354, 367–68 creative talent recruitment and, 324 de Blasio and, 169 East Village and, 21 Harlem and, 296–99, 308, 310, 313 homelessness and, 204 Hudson Yards and, 244–45 Lower East Side and, 53 luxury vision of city, 2, 37, 159–60, 200, 220 nanny state and, 166–67 Queens and, 376–77, 382, 384–85 rezonings and, 159–62 September 11 attacks and, 115, 137, 156–58 term limits and, 165–66 Times Square and, 265–66, 273–74 tourism and, 118, 250–52, 254, 258 West Chelsea and, 236, 239 Bloomberg Associates, 169 Bloomberg’s New York (Brash), 105, 115, 158–59 Blue & Cream, 92, 99–100 Blue Residential Tower, 50 Bobby’s Happy House, 299–300, 301–2 Bohemianism, 57–58, 60, 140–41, 142, 152–53 Boissevain, Jeremy, 257 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 392 Bono, Jake, 382–84 Bono Sawdust Supply Company, 382–84 Bookmarc, 174–75 Borowitz, Andy, 167 Boulud, Daniel, 92–93 Bourgeois, Louise, 352 Bouwerie Lane Theater, 94 Bowery, 81–102 Bowery Bar, 87–90 Bowery Hotel, 93 Bowery House, 95 Bowery Residents’ Committee (BRC), 82 Bowery Wine Company, 92, 96 Bowles, Paul, 252 Bowman, David, 17 Boyer, M.


pages: 162 words: 51,473

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

The evidence is overwhelming, and it comes from many sources—from government agencies like the Bureau of the Census, from Fortune’s annual survey of executive compensation, and so on. And, of course, there’s the evidence that confronts anyone with open eyes. Tom Wolfe is neither an economist nor a liberal, but he is an acute observer. When he wanted to portray what was happening in American society he came up with the world of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Here’s a rough (and reasonably certain) picture of what has happened: The standard of living of the poorest 10 percent of American families is significantly lower today than it was a generation ago. Families in the middle are, at best, slightly better off. Only the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans have achieved income growth at anything like the rates nearly everyone experienced between the forties and early seventies.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Milken was indicted on almost one hundred counts of racketeering—and eventually sent to jail. Across in Britain, Hanson’s ambition overran itself: after an unsuccessful play for ICI, its two founders effectively broke up the company in 1996. Goldsmith ended his career as an antiglobalization crusader. Wall Streeters were pilloried for their greed in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Liar’s Poker (1989), and Barbarians at the Gate (1991). By the end of the century, shareholders had plainly failed to restrain managerial power in the way that many had hoped. Nine in ten big American companies were incorporated in Delaware, a state whose laws favored managers over shareholders.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

O’Rourke River Town, by Peter Hessler Novels I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe Reading in the Dark, by Seamus Deane Dubliners, by James Joyce The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card Disgrace, by J. M. Coetze Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe Saturday, by Ian McEwan Random On Paradise Drive, by David Brooks How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen A Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris Clinton & Me, by Mark Katz What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace 181 Acknowledgments I am lucky on many levels, and it’s most evident if I think about the people who have entered my life.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America.

INDEX Abortion, 176 Acid rain, 86 Affirmative action, 237, 293 Afghanistan, 26, 127, 275 African National Congress, 15, 111 Afrikaners, 14, 21, 111, 172 Afro-American culture, 237 Aganbegyan, Abel, 29 Alawi-dominated regime (Syria), 16 Albalkin, Leonid, 29 Albania, 27, 112 Alcibiades, 317 Alexander II, Czar of Russia, 75 Alfonsin government (Argentina), 14 Algeria, 275 Alienation, 65, 197, 335 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 5 Alwyn, Patricio, 42 Ambition, 162 American Bill of Rights, 43, 159 American Civil War, 171, 175-176, 261, 330 American Revolution, 42, 64, 134 Amish, 85 Amour-propre, 83-84, 155, 162, 255 Andropov, Yuri, 47 Angell, Norman, 5 Anger, 163-165, 171, 172, 178-180 Angola, 35 Animal behavior, 297 Anomie, 337 Anthropology, 151 Anti-liberal doctrines, 235-244 Anti-Stalinism, 30, 40 Apartheid, 20-21, 77, 111, 171-172 Aquino, Corazon, 14, 119-120 Arab-Israeli conflict, 283 Aral Sea, 115 Argentina, 14, 16, 19, 20, 23, 42, 104-106, 112, 113, 256 Aristocracies, 45, 185-86, 200, 259, 260, 265 Aristophanes, 296 Aristotle, 55-56, 127, 335 Aron, Raymond, 66, 95 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 102 Assembly of Women (Aristophanes), 294 Associational life, 322-324 Astayev, Viktor, 37 Ataturk, Kemal, 236, 256, 272 Athens, 48, 127, 184, 247, 316, 317 Athletic competition, 318-320 Atlantic Charter, 258 Augustine, Saint, 56, 183 Australia, 111 Austria-Hungary, 333 Authoritarianism, 8-9, 11, 12, 37, 39-42, 124 current crisis of, 13-22, 44, 47 market-oriented, 123, 124 new Asian, 238-243 Ba‘ath parties, 16, 236 Bacon, Francis, 56, 57, 72, 135 Baigan, Ishida, 227 Balance of power, 247-250 Baltic states, 27-28, 215, 273 Bangladesh, 275 Basques, 269 Battle of Jena, significance of, 64, 67 Beast with red cheeks, 162, 170-180, 188 “Bee and the Communist Ideal, The” (Nuikin), 23 Belief, 309-310 Bell, Daniel, 91 Bellah, Robert, 227, 229 Belorussia, 35 Beria, Lavrenty, 32, 40 Berlin Wall, 27, 178, 263, 280 Biology, 151 Bipolarity, 248, 255, 262 Black market (Soviet), 32 Black underclass, 293-294 Bogomolov, Oleg, 29 Bolshevik party, 43 Bolshevik Revolution, 24, 25, 66, 304-305 Bombing, 6 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 329 Botswana, 35 Bourgeois, 145, 160, 180, 185, 188, 189, 314, 323, 329 Brazil, 14, 20, 42, 104-105, 112, 123 Brezhnev, Leonid, 8, 10, 32, 76 Brezhneva, Galina, 16 Bryce, Lord, 42 Buddhism, 216-217, 227 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 169 Bulgaria, 27, 36, 112 Bureaucracy, 65, 89 as characteristic of modern societies, 77-78 Burma, 14, 85 Bush, George, 318, 328 Bushido ethic, 227 Caetano, Marcello, 13, 18 Calvinism, 226, 227, 229 Cambodia, 79, 127, 275, 293 Canada, 264 Capitalism, 44, 90-91, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 114, 120, 204, 226-230, 290, 292, 316 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 123 Capital punishment, 261 Carthage, 248 Caste system, 228 Catholicism, 19, 221 Ceaucescu, Nicolae, 115 Centrally planned economic systems, 90, 91, 93-96, 98, 107 Ceylon, 123 Chad, 275 Chamorro, Violetta, 14 Charismatic authority, 115 Charter 77, 166 Charter of the United Nations, 282 Checks and balances, 188 Chemical and biological weapons, 278 Chemistry, 151 Chernenko, Konstantin, 47 Chernobyl, 115 Chiang Ching-kuo, 14 Chile, 14, 21, 42, 104, 112, 123 Chinese Revolution, 11, 66, 127 Christian Democracy, 284 Christianity, 56 grounds for human equality, 196-197, 301 Hegel and, 216, 301 as slave ideology, 62, 196-198, 205, 261, 301 Churbanov, Yury, 32 Churchill, Winston, 318 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 18, 28 Citizenship, 202, 322 Civil rights, 42-43, 203-204, 237 Civil society, 33, 219, 221, 222 Civil war American, 171, 175-176, 261, 330 English, 271 Spanish, 79 Class conflict, 65, 118-119 Classical liberal trade theory, 100 CNN (Cable News Network), 7 Cold War, 7, 10, 46, 127, 233, 246, 248, 252, 262, 264, 272, 282, 283 Collectivization, 30 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 42 Colombia, 14 Colonialism, 99, 258, 267, 338 Communications technology, 7 Communism, 7, 45; see also Authoritarianism; Communist parties; Totalitarianism belief in permanence of, 8, 10 Havel on, 166-169 legitimacy of, 10-11 as slave ideology, 205 Soviet-style, 9-10 worldwide collapse of, 8, 12, 25-38, 177-179, 264, 280, 293, 296 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 65 Communist parties Chinese, 34 Filipino, 119 Portuguese, 18, 47 South African, 15 Soviet, 26, 27 Spanish, 19 Community, 242, 304, 322-327 Compassion, rise of, 261 Comte, Auguste, 68 Condorcet, Marquis de, 57, 62 Conflict resolution, 117-119 Confucianism, 217, 325 Congress of Vienna, 267, 331 Conservatives, in Soviet Union, 40-41 Constitution of the United States, 25, 153, 184, 187, 200, 204, 296 Consumer electronics industry, 84 Consumerism, 4, 63, 83-85, 126, 169, 230, 242 Contradictions, 61, 64, 65, 136, 137, 139 Cortés, Hernando, 259 Cosmopolitanism, 126 Costa Rica, 123, 217-218 “Cotton mafia,” 32 Craft guilds, 232 Crimean War, 75 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 151 Croatia, 272, 273 Cuba, 10, 14, 25, 127 Cultural relativism, 340 Cultural Revolution, 79, 95, 96 Culture preconditions for democracy, 215, 219-222 relationship to thymos, 213 work attitudes and, 224-225, 230-234 Cunhal, Álvaro, 18 Custine, Marquis de, 25 Cyprus, 20 Czechoslovakia democratic transition in, 36, 112 fall of communist government, 27, 177-178 nationalism in, 273 Darwin, Charles, 299 Debray, Régis, 320 Declaration of Independence, 134, 153, 158, 186, 196, 200, 204, 296 Decline of the West (Spengler), 68 Defensive modernization, 74-76 de Gaulle, Charles, 332 de Klerk, F.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Since top company executives were privy to inside company information, they could obviously cash in big-time by trading in company stock. But the unwritten code frowned on that. “Were everyone to seek to do so …,” Galbraith wrote, “the corporation would be a chaos of competitive avarice.” By the 1980s, competitive avarice was in. Tom Wolfe captured the winner-take-all creed in his book Bonfire of the Vanities, and so did Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie, Wall Street. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” preached Gordon Gekko, the movie’s mogul investor. “Greed is right, greed works…. Greed, in all of its forms … has marked the upward surge of mankind.” It certainly marked the upward surge in CEO pay, which rocketed from forty times the pay of an average company worker in 1980 to nearly four hundred times by 2000.

As former Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips put it, Wall Street “hijacked” the U.S. economy for its own profit, causing a “perilous overconcentration” of economic power. In terms of political power, Wall Street has no peer. Over the past two decades, the bankers portrayed by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities as arrogant “Masters of the Universe” have been even more successful than the leaders of other sectors of business, such as oil or the military-industrial complex or the pharmaceutical industry, in influencing Washington to adopt their agenda. They have lobbied successfully to overturn New Deal–era laws and time-tested government regulations.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.” —Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe’s account has been cited as the greatest hangover in fiction. It’s also a good analogy for the cryptocurrency industry at the start of 2018. The market was in free fall as bitcoin lost half its value, sinking below $10,000 by February, and the state of altcoins was even worse. But for a few months, big investors could pretend the bubble had not popped—they could pray, like Wolfe’s hangover subject, that there was no rupture and that all the money would not leak away.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

Rader: psychiatrist, administers stem cell injections for a variety of illnesses Jason Randal: magician, mentalist Ronald Reagan: president of the United States, 1981–1989 Sumner Redstone: media magnate, businessman, chairman of CBS, chairman of Viacom Judith Regan: editor, book publisher Eddie Rehfeldt: executive creative director for the communications firm Waggener Edstrom David Remnick: journalist, author, editor of the New Yorker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize David Rhodes: president of CBS News, former vice president of news for Fox News Matthieu Ricard: Buddhist monk, photographer, author of Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill Condoleezza Rice: U.S. secretary of state, 2005–2009, former U.S. national security advisor, former provost at Stanford University, professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Frank Rich: journalist, author, former columnist for the New York Times, editor at large for New York magazine Michael Rinder: activist and former senior executive for the Church of Scientology International Richard Riordan: mayor of Los Angeles, 1993–2001, businessman Tony Robbins: life coach, author, motivational speaker Robert Wilson and Richard Hutton: criminal defense attorneys Brian L. Roberts: chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation Burton B. Roberts: chief administrative judge, New York Supreme Court in the Bronx, model for a character in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities Michael Roberts: fashion journalist, fashion and style director at Vanity Fair, former fashion director at the New Yorker Joe Robinson: speaker and trainer on work-life balance and productivity Gerry Roche: senior chairman of Heidrick & Struggles, a business executive recruiting firm Aaron Rose: film director, art-show curator, writer Charlie Rose: journalist, TV interviewer, host of PBS’s Charlie Rose Maer Roshan: writer, editor, entrepreneur who launched Radar magazine and radaronline.com Pasquale Rotella: founder of Insomniac Events, which produces music festival Electric Daisy Carnival Karl Rove: Republican political consultant, chief strategist for George W.


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The first instinct of market participants, who rarely have personal experience of extended downturns, since up to 2008 there had not been any since the early 1980s, is that time will solve the problem. Markets always come back. Except, of course, when they don’t. The new “Masters of the Universe,” as Tom Wolfe dubbed the Sherman McCoys of this world in The Bonfire of the Vanities (Bantam, 1998), actually believed that their way of life is natural. After the panic of 2008 recedes in memory, people will become less hostile to finance, regulations will prove unworkable, and the political tide will turn. No doubt Richard Whitney, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and uncrowned king of the 1920s Golconda, felt the same way, at least until he was headed to Sing Sing.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

It will need to support the markets. Stay long risk. We are in a bull market! Buy some Chinese stocks into month end. The central banks are engaged. But as I head to the airport, I realize that Vegas has not made me feel better about anything. We are back in a bubble. Notes 10 Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. 11 “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus. 12 “Paradise City,” Guns N’ Roses. Chapter 3 The Star Tavern and Life in Knightsbridge December 2019 12/5/19—Impeachment proceedings begin in the US House of Representatives. 12/6/19—Payrolls beat at 266K; unemployment back down to 3.5%; average hourly earnings +3.1%. 12/11/19—Fed on hold.


pages: 687 words: 204,164

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities, deskilling, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fear of failure, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, l'esprit de l'escalier

The Chief gave me my badge and my revolver back. I’m reinstated; I’m a real cop again.” “Oh, my God, Nestor! That’s… so… wonderful!” said Ghislaine. About the Author Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his BA at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American Studies at Yale. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City.

He lives in New York City. ALSO BY TOM WOLFE The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby The Pump House Gang The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers The Painted Word Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine The Right Stuff In Our Time From Bauhaus to Our House The Bonfire of the Vanities A Man in Full Hooking Up I Am Charlotte Simmons * “Look at her! Granny, you spit when you talk, like a rabid mutt foaming at the mouth.” * “your dumb ass of a man”; literally, “your little pubic hair.” * “What a pair you make, you stupid bitch!” * “Don’t fuck with me with your little fits.


pages: 416 words: 204,183

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany by Tim Jepson, Jonathan Buckley, Rough Guides

air freight, Bonfire of the Vanities, car-free, classic study, housing crisis, land reform, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

. $-6# 5BCBTDP (The terrace is called the arringhiera, from the same root as the English word “harangue”.) Tempers can get frayed at such gatherings, but things used to be a lot wilder than they are today: in 1343, for example, one inflammatory meeting ended with a man being eaten by a mob. Most famously, it was here that Savonarola held his “Bonfires of the Vanities” (see p.124) – on the very spot where, on May 23, 1498, he was to be executed for heresy. A circular plaque in the pavement near the fountain marks the place. The statues Florence’s political volatility is encapsulated by the Piazza della Signoria’s array of statues, most of which were arranged in the sixteenth century to accentuate the axis of the Uffizi.

Continual decrees were issued from San Marco: profane carnivals were to be outlawed, fasting was to be observed more frequently, children were to act as the agents of the righteous, informing the authorities whenever their parents transgressed the Eternal Law. Irreligious books and paintings, expensive clothes, cosmetics, mirrors, board games, trivialities and luxuries of all types were destroyed, a ritual purging that reached a crescendo with a colossal “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the Piazza della Signoria. Meanwhile, Charles VIII was installed in Naples and a formidable alliance was being assembled to overthrow him: the papacy, Milan, Venice, Ferdinand of Aragon and the Emperor Maximilian. In July 1495 the army of this Holy League confronted the French and was badly defeated.


pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Its seventeen simplex and duplex apartments, including two fullfloor units of ten thousand square feet apiece, featured every modern convenience—even jewelry safes for each bedroom, a large silver vault in each kitchen, an ice-making plant and individual refrigerated wine cellars, and private laundry rooms in the basement. These were the first of the sorts of apartments that, eighty years later, inspired the fictional one created by Tom Wolfe for Sherman McCoy, the hapless lead character in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: “the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York, and for that matter, all over the world.” The first renters at 998—attracted by a lavish hardcover brochure— included a granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt; Levi Morton, U.S. vice president under Benjamin Harrison; the former secretary of state and war Elihu Root; John Jacob “Jack” Astor V, who moved in after surviving, in utero, the sinking of the Titanic; and Murray Guggenheim of the mining Guggenheims.

“We were all frozen, all in fur coats, surrounded by glorious flowers,” says one attendee. “They were done by the mistress, though we didn’t know that at the time.” The building staff may have been the first to learn of the affair, and some of them later came to believe that a scene in the film based on Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which the protagonist Sherman McCoy calls his mistress from a pay phone right outside his building, was based on Perelman and Kasen. “He had that reputation,” Patrick O’Connor says carefully. “He was a strange character. Not very polite. A double life is bound to catch up with you.” Perelman’s double life caught up with him when the luxury jeweler Bulgari accidentally sent a pair of blue-sapphire-and-diamond earrings meant for Kasen to Faith.


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

If they feel the need to exhibit their wealth, as many do, they will start to indulge in various luxuries and extravagances that make them increasingly dependent on others—both those who are the source of wealth (patrons, bosses, clients) and those who provide services (servants, chauffeurs, beauticians). And this concern for expensive superfluities will lead to their wasting both their resources and, much more importantly, their time. Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, set in the world of New York’s financial wheelers and dealers, offers a memorable portrayal of all these failings in a modern context. Claims of this sort regarding the effects of wealth on an individual are obviously neither necessary nor universal. Some who become rich, far from becoming extravagant, grow increasingly parsimonious.


pages: 244 words: 85,379

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Bonfire of the Vanities, Day of the Dead, fear of failure, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, old-boy network, pink-collar, telemarketer, traveling salesman, War on Poverty

I believe that Blood Meridian is another, although there are great whacks of it that I don’t fully understand. What of that? I can’t decipher the words to many of the popular songs I love, either. There’s also stuff you’ll never find in the dictionary, but it’s still vocabulary. Check out the following: —Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities “Egggh, whaddaya? Whaddaya want from me?” “Here come Hymie!” “Unnh! Unnnh! Unnnhh!” “Chew my willie, Yo’ Honor.” “Yeggghhh, fuck you, too, man!”This last is phonetically rendered street vocabulary. Few writers have Wolfe’s ability to translate such stuff to the page. (Elmore Leonard is another writer who can do it.)


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

Other books to read Ha-Joon Chang and Illene Grabel (2004) Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Manual, Zed Books, London Herman Daly and John Cobb (1994) For the Common Good, Beacon Press, New York Herman Daly and Joshua Farley (2004) Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications, Island Press, Washington, DC Jeff Gates (2001) Democracy at Risk, Perseus, New York Oliver James (2008) The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza, Vermilion Books, London David Korten (1995) When Corporations Rule the World, Earthscan, London Bernard Lietaer (2001) The Future of Money, Century, London Erik Reinart (2007) How Rich Countries got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, Constable, New York Vandana Shiva (1999) Stolen Harvest, South End Press, New York Joseph Stiglitz (2002) Globalisation and its Discontents, Penguin, London 16 THE NEW ECONOMICS Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Tom Wolfe (1988) Bonfire of the Vanities, Cape, London. Arts Council (1946), First Annual Report, London. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2008) Climate Change 2007, Geneva. United Nations Development Programme (1998) Consumption for Human Development, Oxford University Press, New York. Daily Telegraph (2003) 16 April.


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

We prefer the term “respect” because it brings out more clearly its interpersonal dimension. Respect is conferred; dignity is inherent. Still, our ability to respect a human being presupposes that there is something in him worthy of respect, and this something could, if desired, be called dignity. * Sherman McCoy, the “master of the universe” in Tom Wolfe’s novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, consumes his salary in rents, school fees, etc., with the result that bankruptcy follows within a few weeks of his losing his job. He is in effect a wage-slave, if a rather well-heeled one. * Lord Turner admits this possibility. In his third lecture, he writes that the ends of change and economic freedom “need to be balanced against other potentially desirable objectives.”


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

This claim seemed to be vindicated when two hedge fund partners, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1997. Their Greenwichbased firm, Long Term Capital Management had been founded by John Meriwether, a former highly successful bond trader at Salomon, Lewis’s boss and widely believed to be the inspiration for the Bonfire of the Vanities , Tom Wolf’s 1980s novel of Wall Street excess. For a while the heavily-leveraged operation grew to be one of the most lucrative of the American hedge funds. Even when their award-winning formula failed and LTCM collapsed in 1998, nearly bringing Wall Street down with it, the modelling and recruitment continued.


How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers by Richard Cohen

Anton Chekhov, Bonfire of the Vanities, colonial rule, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Joan Didion, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, University of East Anglia

I was her editor and didn’t question it; only after the book was published did we both agree that that first sentence drew the wrong attention to itself. Not that outrageous openings can’t work. Quirky can be good: Mikhail Bulgakov begins The Heart of a Dog (1925), “Ooow-ow-ooow-owow!” as if language itself has failed him, and Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), early on the opening page gives us a long drawn-out cackle: “Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Garrison Keillor put such attempts in fine context. “When someone gets in your face as a writer does, either you love him or you loathe him,” he wrote, citing a memoir he was reading of two lesbians who had taken up farming sheep in Minnesota.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Remarkably, as complex a subject as finance was, story lines of trading desks and boardroom aspirations found themselves expressed fully in pop culture. Family Ties, the second-highest-rated show on television in the mid-1980s, starred Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton, a precocious and charming ball of comically moneyed ambition. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities spent several weeks at number one on the New York Times best-seller list in 1988. Its main character was a top-producing bond trader, a “Master of the Universe” in Wolfe’s telling. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street gave American cinema one of its most memorable antiheroes in Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas.

., 427–28, 430–31, 465 Atlantic & Pacific, 191 Austria-Hungary, 296, 297 automobiles, 279–91 assembly line manufacturing and, 289–90 building of factories, in 1980s, 489–90 Durant and, 281, 286–87 Ford and, 281–83, 284–86, 287–91 government regulation of roads and, 283–84 internal combustion versus steam power, 279–80 Japanese competition in 1970s and, 438 Model T and, 286, 288–89, 291 production of, during Great Depression, 329, 335 production of, during World War II, 364 references in rap music, 451–53 B-24 Liberator (bomber), 361–62 Baldwin Locomotive, 362 Ball, Lucille, 381, 383–84 Ballmer, Steve, 487 Bank of America (Italian-American Bank), 310, 344, 345 Bank of United States, 325–26 banks/banking bank holidays, 331–34 failures, during Great Depression, 324–28 Barksdale, Jim, 472 Barnes & Noble, 442 baseball, 391 BASIC programming language, 430 Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), 354, 489 beaver fur trade, 14–15, 17 Beaver (ship), 39 Beckert, Sven, 145 Beecher, Catharine, 198–99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 136 beer, 178–80, 183–84 Bellona (steamboat), 64, 65, 67 Benchmark Capital, 474 Ben-Hur (film), 337–38 Berkman, Alexander, 222 Berkshire Hathaway, 436–37, 442–43 Berlin Wall, fall of, 484 Berners-Lee, Time, 466–68, 480 Bessemer, Henry, 168 Bessemer Steel Association, 172 Best Friend (locomotive), 82 Beveridge, Albert, 274 Bezos, Jeff, 470–71 Billings, John Shaw, 412 Bissell, George, 150 Bloomingdale’s, 207 Blue Ribbon Sports, 458 Boeing, 490 Bond, Joseph, 130 bonds/bond market for canal financing, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Chrysler and, 440 for Civil War financing, 146–47 formation of US Steel and, 248 Jay Cooke & Co., 169 junk bonds, 439–42 U.S. government bond yields in 1981, 440 World War I and, 299 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 449 bootlegging, 315–19 B&O Railroad Company, 81–82 Boston tea party, 39–40 bottling, 179 Bowerman, Bill, 458 boxing, 304 boycott, colonial of British goods, 37–38 Bradford, William, 3, 4, 11, 12–13, 16, 17 Brewster, William, 10 Brinkley, Alan, 473 British East India Company, 38–39 Broderick, Joseph, 326 Brooklyn Bridge, 194 Brooks, Preston, 121 Brown, John, 135–36 Brown, Kay, 337 Brush, Charles, 185 Bryan, Joseph, 123 Bryan, William Jennings, 233–37, 241, 246–47, 298 bubbles in Internet stocks, 472–78 in slave prices (Negro Fever), 126, 130–31 Buchanan, James, 121 Budweiser, 180 buffalo, 177 Buffett, Warren, 423, 437 Buick, David, 280 Buick Manufacturing Company, 280–81, 286–87 Busch, Adolphus, 178–79 Bush, George H.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Remarkably, as complex a subject as finance was, story lines of trading desks and boardroom aspirations found themselves expressed fully in pop culture. Family Ties, the second-highest-rated show on television in the mid-1980s, starred Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton, a precocious and charming ball of comically moneyed ambition. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities spent several weeks at number one on the New York Times best-seller list in 1988. Its main character was a top-producing bond trader, a “Master of the Universe” in Wolfe’s telling. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street gave American cinema one of its most memorable antiheroes in Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas.

., 427–28, 430–31, 465 Atlantic & Pacific, 191 Austria-Hungary, 296, 297 automobiles, 279–91 assembly line manufacturing and, 289–90 building of factories, in 1980s, 489–90 Durant and, 281, 286–87 Ford and, 281–83, 284–86, 287–91 government regulation of roads and, 283–84 internal combustion versus steam power, 279–80 Japanese competition in 1970s and, 438 Model T and, 286, 288–89, 291 production of, during Great Depression, 329, 335 production of, during World War II, 364 references in rap music, 451–53 B-24 Liberator (bomber), 361–62 Baldwin Locomotive, 362 Ball, Lucille, 381, 383–84 Ballmer, Steve, 487 Bank of America (Italian-American Bank), 310, 344, 345 Bank of United States, 325–26 banks/banking bank holidays, 331–34 failures, during Great Depression, 324–28 Barksdale, Jim, 472 Barnes & Noble, 442 baseball, 391 BASIC programming language, 430 Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), 354, 489 beaver fur trade, 14–15, 17 Beaver (ship), 39 Beckert, Sven, 145 Beecher, Catharine, 198–99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 136 beer, 178–80, 183–84 Bellona (steamboat), 64, 65, 67 Benchmark Capital, 474 Ben-Hur (film), 337–38 Berkman, Alexander, 222 Berkshire Hathaway, 436–37, 442–43 Berlin Wall, fall of, 484 Berners-Lee, Time, 466–68, 480 Bessemer, Henry, 168 Bessemer Steel Association, 172 Best Friend (locomotive), 82 Beveridge, Albert, 274 Bezos, Jeff, 470–71 Billings, John Shaw, 412 Bissell, George, 150 Bloomingdale’s, 207 Blue Ribbon Sports, 458 Boeing, 490 Bond, Joseph, 130 bonds/bond market for canal financing, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Chrysler and, 440 for Civil War financing, 146–47 formation of US Steel and, 248 Jay Cooke & Co., 169 junk bonds, 439–42 U.S. government bond yields in 1981, 440 World War I and, 299 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 449 bootlegging, 315–19 B&O Railroad Company, 81–82 Boston tea party, 39–40 bottling, 179 Bowerman, Bill, 458 boxing, 304 boycott, colonial of British goods, 37–38 Bradford, William, 3, 4, 11, 12–13, 16, 17 Brewster, William, 10 Brinkley, Alan, 473 British East India Company, 38–39 Broderick, Joseph, 326 Brooklyn Bridge, 194 Brooks, Preston, 121 Brown, John, 135–36 Brown, Kay, 337 Brush, Charles, 185 Bryan, Joseph, 123 Bryan, William Jennings, 233–37, 241, 246–47, 298 bubbles in Internet stocks, 472–78 in slave prices (Negro Fever), 126, 130–31 Buchanan, James, 121 Budweiser, 180 buffalo, 177 Buffett, Warren, 423, 437 Buick, David, 280 Buick Manufacturing Company, 280–81, 286–87 Busch, Adolphus, 178–79 Bush, George H.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

The information highway will allow the transfer of intellectual property rights from one person to another at the speed of light. Almost all the music, writing, or other intellectual properties stored on disks or in books sits unused most of the time. When you're not consuming your particular copy of Thriller or Bonfire of the Vanities, most likely no one else is, either. Publishers count on this. If the average buyer lent his or her albums and books frequently, fewer would be sold and prices would be higher. If we assume that an album is in use, say, 0.1 percent of the time, "light speed" lending might cut the number of copies sold by a factor of 1,000.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

From the student perspective, it might as well not have been there at all, since at the same time that HBS graduates were streaming onto Wall Street, so too were a large percentage of graduates from Harvard College. From the faculty perspective, however, the intellectual distance between HBS and the rest of Harvard widened to the largest it had been since the days of the School’s founding. In the decade of greed, the market was triumphant, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities was more aspirational novel than cautionary tale, and whatever reticence had existed at HBS about the maximization of wealth as the central purpose of business disappeared along with the seemingly antiquated notion of a corporation’s responsibility to anyone other than its shareholders. The separation wasn’t just metaphorical, either: In 1981, HBS announced the discontinuation of all non-School use of its facilities, including by others at Harvard itself.2 “For as long as anyone can remember Harvard’s courses have mostly bubbled up from its faculty’s interests: A professor would become intrigued by something and do research on it,” wrote Walter Kiechel in Fortune.

., 102 Bewkes, Jeff, 534 Bharara, Preet, 441 Bhatnagar, Sanjay, 514 Big Time, The (Shames), 168, 173, 324–25, 529 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 211 Bilzerian, Paul, 380 Birkinshaw, Julian, 226, 396–97, 539 Bishop, John, 215 Black, Leon, 531, 534 Blackstone Group, 76, 125, 394, 468, 470, 531 Blavatnik, Len, 531 Bloomberg, Michael, 456, 510–11, 530–31, 561–62, 563 Bloomingdale’s, 169, 171 Board of Directors of Small Corporations, The (Mace), 325 Boesky, Ivan F., 380, 431 Bogart, Humphrey, 183 Bok, Derek, 206, 334–41, 435, 567 Bok, Sissela, 337 Bollinger, Lynn, 326 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 453 Booth, David G., 533 Borden, Neil, 293 Boston Beer Company, 456, 477 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 3, 207, 210, 417, 458, 460, 477, 507 Botlin, Ana Patricia, 241 Bower, Joseph, 413 Bower, Marvin, 105, 132, 142, 184, 199–212, 246, 254, 288, 289, 436, 458; Bok and, 337–40; case method and, 202–3, 206; Fellowship Program, 208–9; Matsushita Chair and, 205–6; McArthur and, 339–40 Bower-Gordon Award, 458 Bowes, Bill, 323 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 56 Bradshaw, Thornton, 105–6 Brandeis, Louis, 131 Breech, Ernest, 270 Breyer, Jim, 321 Broadway, Robert, 531 Brooker, Katrina, 480 Brooks, John, 289 Broughton, Philip Delves, 546, 552, 559, 568 Brown, Charles, 106 Brown, Theodore, 154 Browne, Jacqueline, 203 Brownstein, Howard, 507 “Brownsville Girl” (song), 397 “Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School, The” (Podolny), 236, 439–40 Budgetary Control (McKinsey), 116 Buffett, Warren, 480, 482 Built to Last (Collins and Porras), 492 Bundy, McGeorge, 218 Bupp, Chip, 519 Bureau of Business Research (BBR), 38, 94–95 Burke, James, 169, 171, 525–29 Burnham, Elizabeth Abbott, 238 Burr, Francis H., 401 Bursk, Edward, 297 Bush, George H.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Harry’s Café & Steak 1 Hanover Square, at Pearl St 212 785 9200, harrysnyc.com; subway #2, #3 to Wall St; map. Housed in the basement of historic India House since 1972, and traditionally the haunt of Wall Street deal-makers. Order sandwiches ($17–28) or the lauded prime steaks (from $49) while soaking up the “Gilded Age” atmosphere, immortalized in novels such as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. The unlimited champagne brunch (Sat 11am–3pm) is a good deal (mains $18–46). Mon–Fri 11.30am–midnight (bar till 1am), Sat 11am–midnight (bar till 2am). The Paris Café 119 South St 212 240 9797, pariscafenyc.com; subway A, C, J, Z, #2, #3, #4, #5 to Fulton St; map.

See also Wharton’s astounding House of Mirth and her classic stories Old New York. Don Winslow The Force. A master of gritty detective storytelling leavened with ample wit, Winslow tackles race, police tactics and the brotherhood of the badge in this modern epic, largely set on the streets of Harlem. Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities. Set all around New York City, this sprawling novel skewers 1980s status-mongers to great effect. < Back to Contexts New York on film With its skyline and rugged facades, its mean streets and swanky avenues, its electric energy and edgy attitude, New York City is a natural-born movie star; indeed, it’s probably been the most filmed city on Earth, home to noir, gangster flicks, sappy romances and low-budget indie movies in equal measure.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

When the weather was nice, Meriwether and his partners were as likely to be on the links at nearby Winged Foot Country Club as on the trading floor. There was no reason not to golf; the computers were in control. JM’s public persona was the bold, brash, Wall Street “master of the universe,” as portrayed in two iconic books, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Michael Lewis’s 1989 comic memoir, Liar’s Poker. Wolfe told the story of larger-than-life bond trader Sherman McCoy, who held a position similar to Meriwether’s at Salomon Brothers. The comparison was impossible to miss. Lewis told a real-life anecdote about a million-dollar bet made on the Salomon trading floor between Meriwether and Gutfreund on a single liar’s poker hand, a legend that dogged JM.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

Ware’s method is to publish a page each week or so in a weekly paper (the Sunday New York Times, the Chicago Reader), then redraw the entire chapter and send it out as an edition of the Novelty Library, then redraw it a third time when the entire book is published. So this is a way of getting intermediate results, but you could just wait for the final books themselves (if they are ever finished). Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe Absolutely fantastic. A rare must-read novel—packed full of information about society, journalism, activism, race, etc. I can’t convey just how good it really is. It’s like The Power Broker of fiction. How to Win Friends and Influence People (reread) by Dale Carnegie There’s a reason this is a classic.


pages: 446 words: 108,844

The Driver: My Dangerous Pursuit of Speed and Truth in the Outlaw Racing World by Alexander Roy

Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Google Earth, messenger bag, post-work, urban planning, urban sprawl

A trio of mustached Moroccan police—all in pressed royal-blue uniforms, double-breasted jackets, light blue shirts, black ties, shiny boots, bright white belts, shoulder straps, and hats—enthusiastically waved us on. I was driving 74 mph in a densely populated urban area. Legally. We were moving up the grid. Kinsley leaned right in her seat. “Traffic circle ahead!” 77 “Keep those warnings coming! We don’t need a North African Bonfire of the Vanities!” HIGHWAY P24 APPROXIMATELY 100 MILES NORTHEAST OF MARRAKECH LATE MORNING The convoy’s tight columns uncoiled, lunging and fighting two and sometimes three cars abreast—one column against thankfully infrequent oncoming traffic, forcing locals onto the left shoulder, the other onto the right shoulder when debris didn’t force quick reentry into the one legal lane.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

“We chose the first option, without dissent,” Powell said.1 Upping the ante A few months later, Powell again wrestled with the problem of what to do with a financial institution on the verge of insolvency—this time, with greater stakes. Salomon Brothers had dominated 1980s Wall Street, both financially—the investment bank was consistently one of the most profitable firms—and culturally. It was the fictional backdrop for The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 satire of an ambitious bond salesman, as well as the actual setting for Michael Lewis’s 1989 Liar’s Poker, a searing critique of testosterone-driven trading culture. But by 1991, as the Wall Street party was quickly turning into a hangover, the all-powerful Salomon Brothers had hit a wall.


The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, interchangeable parts, plutocrats, rent control, rent stabilization, Socratic dialogue, traveling salesman, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Additional Praise for The Bonfire Of The Vanities “Brilliant—Bonfire illumines the modern madness that [was] New York in the 1980s with the intense precision of a laser beam.” —People “Impossible to put down.” —The Wall Street Journal “Marvelous.” —Business Week “It’s The Human Comedy, on a skyscraper scale and at a taxi-meter pace.” —Newsweek “Vintage Wolfe…The plot is an astonishing intricate machine that manages to mesh at every turn.” —The New York Times “It’s a monstrous pleasure to watch this world burn…. Wolfe’s conflagration sweeps away New York in a great tragicomic circus….

Also by Tom Wolfe The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby The Pump House Gang The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers The Painted Word Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine The Right Stuff In Our Time From Bauhaus to Our House A Man in Full Hooking Up I Am Charlotte Simmons © 2004 by Mark Seliger Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City. THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Copyright © 1987 by Tom Wolfe. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

If you run a hedge fund, a tech company, or a law firm, you depend on talent that increasingly comes in all colors from all backgrounds and countries. Forty years ago, nearly three-quarters of the graduates of engineering and science doctoral programs were U.S.-born white males; now only a third are.12 The quants on Wall Street look nothing like Sherman McCoy, the pedigreed WASP protagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities. And, increasingly, the highly educated engineers and computer scientists working in Silicon Valley look nothing like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. They are as likely to be from Madras as Massachusetts. The same trend is evident in law. In 2009, the graduating class of Harvard Law School was a quarter nonwhite, and if you were to meet all of the first-year associates at a top firm like Cravath, Moore, you’d see a snapshot of a professional upper class in rapid demographic transition.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

In December 1987, audiences in movie theaters listened to Gordon Gekko, the slimy takeover artist played by Michael Douglas, proclaim the mantra for the decade in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Greed is good.” A series of popular books reflecting the anti–Wall Street sentiment hit the presses: Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Barbarians at the Gate by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, The Predators’ Ball by Connie Bruck, Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. The quants were licking their wounds. Their wondrous invention, portfolio insurance, was roundly blamed for the meltdown.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

First, unlike the U.S. government, corporations can go into default, which means credit risk is added as a consideration to yield curve dynamics. Second, there is far more liquidity risk. There are many more corporate bonds than Treasury bonds, and most corporate bonds only traded by appointment. This led, true to the caricature in Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, to bond salesmen whose principal expertise was knowing who owned what bonds (the principal value of having done the bond underwriting) and passing these bonds from one hand to the other for a spread. Sell $100 million of bonds at a quarter-point spread, and the firm would pocket $250,000 for making a few phone calls.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

A century ago, economist Thorstein Veblen argued that the wealthy used conspicuous consumption to establish their social status; does philanthropy take that to the next level, as conspicuous nonconsumption? “Wealthy donors were generally more focused on their peers, rather than those outside their class, as the audience for their philanthropy,” concludes Ostrower in her study of philanthropists. Tom Wolfe, author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, apparently agrees and derides much of the philanthropy of the new hedge fund tycoons as ego driven. In a savage piece in Portfolio magazine in 2007, Wolfe reveled (among other things) in the difficulty that the hedge funders were having buying their way onto the boards of the citadels of old New York philanthropy.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

When you read, you translate the black-and-white symbols on the page into vivid, Technicolor pictures in your mind—but everybody’s mental pictures are different. This makes each reader a collaborator with the author in the creation of his or her own entertainment. Film, for all its wonders, is an infinitely more passive medium for just this reason—and it undermines rather than enhances imagination. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is one of the most read and applauded novels about business and greed ever written because of its visionary and descriptive prose, but the movie was a bust. Even good films suffer in comparison to what we imagine from the pages of a book. The Natural is considered by many to be one of the best baseball films of all time—but those same people will assert that the book was better.


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The Brady report explained this tragedy by denouncing “mechanical, price-insensitive selling . . . concentrated in the hands of surprisingly few institutions” and proposed a series of constraints to bring the market’s penchant for wildness under control. The popular literature about the world of investment in the 1980s carries titles that reflect those events: Bonfire of the Vanities, Barbarians at the Gates, The Predators’ Ball, and Liars’ Poker. The main characters are arrogant, greedy, cynical, and shady. At one point or another in their careers, they grow rich beyond the dreams of most of us—largely because they have profited from the new technologies, novel financial instruments, and mysterious investment strategies that emerged from the revolution in finance and investing.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Even more important, they pushed for an energized and cohesive party dedicated to a radical restructuring of government’s role to unleash the winner-take-all economy. The baby steps of the 1980s were ready to give way to something more ambitious. Chapter 8 Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century By all accounts, the 1980s was a great time to be rich. As chronicled in pop-culture movies like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street, it was a moment when capitalism’s winners took center stage. And as they did so, they revealed the contours of a new capitalism. Deal-makers and financial gamblers were supplanting captains of industry as the biggest winners of all. But the 1980s was just a warm-up act. The staggering paychecks that generated such wonder and bewilderment would have been dismissed a few years later as decidedly second-rate.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

To keep the firm afloat, Lorenzo was driven to raid the municipal Monte delle Dote (a kind of mutual fund for the payment of daughters’ dowries).38 Finally, in 1494, amid the chaos of a French invasion, the family was expelled and all its property confiscated and liquidated. Blaming the Medici for the town’s misfortunes, the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola called for a purgative ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, a call answered when a mob invaded the Medici palace and burned most of the bank’s records. (Black scorch marks are still visible on the papers that survived.) As Lorenzo himself had put it in a song he composed in the 1470s: ‘If you would be happy, be so. / There is no certainty about tomorrow.’


pages: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

Boynton, interviewed the authors of these and other recent nonfiction classics for a 2005 book called The New New Journalism. With the exception of Jimmy Breslin, who continued to write a weekly column until retiring from newspaper work in November 2004, New Journalism’s greatest practitioners moved on to other pursuits. Tom Wolfe virtually gave up journalism to devote himself to novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons. Michael Herr has published only three smallish titles in the years since Dispatches. Since publishing Thy Neighbor’s Wife, his 1980 book about sexual mores in America, Gay Talese has written only one other book (Unto the Sons, a multigenerational saga of his own family) and has spent ten years working on the next one.


pages: 224 words: 91,918

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

Of the many other people I talked to or corresponded with, I particularly want to mention Vic Lovell, Paul Sawyer, Paul Krassner, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan, Paul Robertson, Jerry Garcia, Gary Goldhill, Michael Bowen, Anne Severson, Paul Hawken, Bill Tara, Michael Laton, Jack the Fluke, Bill Graham, John Bartholomew Tucker, Roger Grimsby, Marshall Efron, Robin White, Larry McMurtry, Larry Schiller, Donovan Bess, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, and Mr. and Mrs. Fred Kesey. About the Author TOM WOLFE is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

John Rawls, Harvard’s leading political philosopher, argued that people should set aside their religious views before they could participate in the public square.2 Religion was even out of favor in schools of religion: a report by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1976 found that fewer than half of the graduates of the country’s top five divinity schools—Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Vanderbilt and New York’s Union Theological Seminary—went on to work for the church or engage in further study of religion, down from four-fifths a couple of decades earlier.3 In 1988, fresh from his triumph with The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe told students at Harvard, not entirely happily, that they lived in an era of “freedom from religion.”4 Now God is returning to intellectual life. The revival was supercharged by September 11. After the terrorist attacks large numbers of what David Brooks of The New York Times has diagnosed as “recovering secularists”5 went back to church, and religious courses in universities swelled dramatically.


The Cleaner: The True Story of One of the World’s Most Successful Money Launderers by Bruce Aitken

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", air freight, airport security, Asian financial crisis, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, foreign exchange controls, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, profit motive, risk/return, South China Sea

This was the exact moment that Cowboy was savoring to repeat, yet again, in front of all to hear. “Oh, by the way,” he said casually while all the others laughed, “Did I tell you? I may have forgotten. I have some more good news for you. You just got indicted in Seattle!” It was true; a “Sealed Indictment.” I replied that years earlier I had read a book called Bonfire of the Vanities, where it pointed out that a grand jury in the USA could indict a ham sandwich. I said, “Now I know what a ham sandwich feels like.” It went over their heads. A rogue prosecution, a rogue system of justice, a rogue government! It was close to noon when we arrived downtown at what I was told was the Federal Building; I had a sinking feeling as we drove into the underground car park.


pages: 421 words: 128,094

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

It was Schwarzman’s sixtieth birthday party on February 13 that elevated him from being one more Wall Street bigwig to a symbol. It transformed him into a cliché for the age and a punching bag. The scale of the bash stunned even jaded Wall Streeters, and to the man in the street the extravagance reinforced every negative stereotype of financiers. It was the reality version of Bonfire of the Vanities, and the press had a field day, for the event encapsulated the power and wealth of private equity and of the small band of men who controlled its biggest firms. The potential political fallout from the party worried Henry Silverman, the ex-Blackstone partner who had left to run Cendant. He says he bluntly asked Schwarzman, “Why would you do this?”


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

Gordon: Finance, Investment and Macroeconomics: The Neoclassical and a Post Keynesian Solution (London: Edward Elgar, 1994). 4. “You see, Daddy didn’t bake the cake, and Daddy isn’t the one who gets to eat it. But he gets to slice the cake and hand it out. And when he does, little golden crumbs fall off the cake. And Daddy gets to eat those.” This extract from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities captures the essence of a lot of investment finance. We slice up raw financial returns and create return distributions that suit people’s portfolios. Thus, for example, a collection of bonds is analogous to a side of beef, the senior tranches of a CDO are like steak, and the junior tranches are like sausages, all priced accordingly with something left over for us.


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal by William D. Cohan

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, David Brooks, fixed income, medical malpractice, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, union organizing

Meadows and Thomas then described the facts of the case, as found in Gottlieb’s affidavit, and how Nifong “publicly criticized” the players for failing to testify about the alleged rape. “There is, however, possibly a different side to the story—a chapter from another Tom Wolfe novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, a tale of a prosecutor exploiting racial tensions with a trumped-up charge.” Newsweek quoted Joe Cheshire, who said Nifong had “unfairly tried the players in the media” as part of his reelection strategy, since one of his principal opponents was a woman. “The real story,” Cheshire said, “is how he pandered to the public to stir up race and class division.”

., 28–29 Beta House fraternity, 611 Beusse, Edwin, 427 Bilas, Jay, 408, 587–88 Birnbach, Lisa, 144 Bishop, Keith, 195, 251, 252, 253, 283, 372 Bissey, Jason, 13, 20, 23, 60 Bissinger, Buzz, 11, 360–62 Black, Freda, 81, 195, 251–52, 282, 372, 523, 556–57, 559 Black Majority (Wood), 141 Black Student Alliance, 408 Blair, Jayson, 394, 403 Bland, Rayone, 186 Bliwise, Robert, 40, 42, 321 Bloom, Harold, 151 Bloxsom, Jeffrey O., 199–200, 280, 284, 302–3, 355, 383 Blue, Dan, 348 Boehmler, William Blake, 122 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 239 Boomer Esiason Foundation, 602 Boone, Wanda, 337 Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm, 159 Bordley, Rob, 275–76, 366 Bork, Bob, Jr., 590 Bostock, Roy, 214 Boston Celtics, 3 Botnick, Marvin, 288 Bowen, William, 214, 219 report of, 317–18, 340, 376, 387 Boyd, Mark, 48 Boyer, Peter, 143, 161, 397–99 Bradley, Ed, 403–4, 410, 437, 474 Brammell, Shirika, 244 Brawley, Tawana, 258, 259, 273, 281 Breaux, Kevin, 51 Brenhouse, Shawn, 219 Breschi, Joe, 210 Brewer, Beth, 425 civil affidavit against Nifong, 485–86, 548 Brocker, Douglas, 479, 540, 556–57, 558 Broder, Dr.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Both From Indifference pp. 131–2 Hella Pick ‘Early Recognition “Is Unstoppable”’ Guardian 5.12.1991 Back to text 152. Serge Schmemann ‘Declaring Death of Soviet Union, Russia and 2 Republics Form New Commonwealth’ NYT 9.12.1991; Celestine Bohlen ‘The Union is Buried: What’s Being Born?’ NYT 9.12.1991. See also David C. Gompert ‘Bonfire of the Vanities: An American Insider’s Take on the Collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia’ in Hamilton & Spohr (eds) Exiting the Cold War, Entering a New World Back to text 153. Glaurdic The Hour pp. 259–60 Back to text 154. Kohl Erinnerungen 1990–1994 pp. 385–90; Favier & Martin-Roland La Décennie Mitterrand iv pp. 227–33.

. – US National Security Interests in Europe Beyond the NATO Area 7.2.1992; NATO and the East: Key issues (Secret) 7pp. (undated [early 1992] – no author). See also Daniel Hamilton & Kristina Spohr (eds) Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security after the Cold War Brookings Institution Press 2019 pp. viii–xx; Gompert ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ Back to text 248. Cf. Piers Robinson The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention Routledge 2002; idem ‘The CNN Effect: Can the News Media Drive Foreign Policy?’ Review of International Studies 25, 2 (April 1999) pp. 301–9; Jonathan Mermin ‘Myth of Media-Driven Foreign Policy’ Political Science Quarterly 112, 3 (autumn 1997) pp. 385–403; Steven Livingston & Todd Eachus ‘Humanitarian Crises and US Foreign Policy: Somalia and the CNN Effect Reconsidered’ Political Communication 12, 4 (1995) pp. 413–29; Bernard C.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Much discussed though they were at the time, however, these exceptions did little to change the character of the era. THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION Ronald Reagan inaugurated the most exuberant era on Wall Street since the 1920s. Financiers became national celebrities. Investment banks sucked in the country’s jeunesse dorée with a promise of instant riches and a glamorous life. Books such as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by Tom Wolfe and Liar’s Poker (1989) by Michael Lewis, as well as films such as Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), glamorized life on the Street even as they pretended to demonize it. A tidal wave of money poured into various financial instruments as the economy expanded and people entrusted their retirement savings to the market.


pages: 462 words: 151,805

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson by Corey Seymour, Johnny Depp, Jann S. Wenner

Bonfire of the Vanities, buy low sell high, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, Y2K

TEX WEAVER was a Woody Creek neighbor of Hunter’s. JANE WENNER is the wife of Jann Wenner and a vice president of Wenner Media. JANN WENNER is the founder, editor, and publisher of Rolling Stone. JOHN WILBUR is a former guard for the Washington Redskins. TOM WOLFE is the author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Bonfire of the Vanities, among many other titles. BARNEY WYCOFF is an Aspen gallery owner. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Fifteen years ago, Jann charged me with being Hunter’s aide-de-camp in New York. Two and a half years ago, he directed me to compile Hunter’s life story. I’m grateful to him for the opportunity, direction, leadership, advice, wisdom, and the many good times along the way.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Fuck You, that’s my name.”*1 He’s like a hellish noncommissioned officer to Gekko’s gleefully demonic general in the U.S. capitalist legion as it was then being reconstituted. In 1987 as well, some Wall Street guys started referring to themselves as Masters of the Universe, thanks to The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel inspired, as he said, by “the ambitious young men (there were no women) who, starting with the 1980s, began racking up millions every year—millions!—in performance bonuses at investment banks.” * * * — Suddenly in the 1980s the news media were also celebrating and glorifying real-life big businessmen as they hadn’t since the 1950s and early ’60s—in fact, as they really hadn’t since the 1910s and ’20s.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

The Jews of Florence were expelled. Gangs of ruffians inspired by Savonarola roamed the city searching for taboo artefacts such as mirrors, cosmetics, musical instruments, secular books, and almost anything beautiful. A huge pile of such treasures was ceremonially burned in the so-called ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in the centre of the city. Botticelli is said to have thrown some of his own paintings into the fire. It was the bonfire of optimism. Eventually Savonarola was himself discarded and burned at the stake. But, although the Medici regained control of Florence, optimism did not. As in Athens, the tradition of art and science continued for a while, and, even a century later, Galileo was sponsored (and then abandoned) by the Medici.


pages: 552 words: 163,292

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art by Michael Shnayerson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, banking crisis, Bonfire of the Vanities, capitalist realism, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Etonian, gentrification, high net worth, index card, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, mass immigration, Michael Milken, NetJets, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, rent control, rolodex, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

Often, the same artist’s work popped up in one client’s home after another. “All of my clients have a Christopher Wool,” Schiff acknowledged. “But I am very happy about that overlap.”35 For this new breed of art advisor, Art Basel Miami Beach was the market’s new epicenter, starting in December 2002. “That was the real bonfire of the vanities,” Schiff noted. “Suddenly there was this excitement about contemporary art. I was quite young, so I wasn’t on top of what was happening at auctions.” But in Miami, Schiff didn’t need to be. The game was in hearing who bought what in the opening minutes of Art Basel Miami Beach, and then snapping up those same artists before everyone else did.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Milken and his family became billionaires and he probably remained one even after paying a fine or penalty of $550 million and spending thirty months in a federal ‘country club’ (minimum-security prison). Fact and fiction about junk bonds Corporate takeovers and junk bonds led to an interesting literature. Consider the titles of both the fiction and the non-fiction. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is a remarkable description of the values of New York’s financial elite. Predator’s Ball by Connie Bruck is a description of an annual party for the buyers and sellers of junk bonds. Barbarians at the Gate is a tale about the would-be takeover of RJR Nabisco; it is hard to decide whether the would-be acquirers or the target was less attractive.


pages: 584 words: 187,436

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deal flow, do well by doing good, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, High speed trading, index fund, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine translation, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, operational security, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule

By 1990 Meriwether’s team included Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, who would later win the Nobel Prize for their pioneering work on options pricing. In the mid-1980s, most Salomon partners had not gone to college, much less a PhD program.4 The personification of the firm’s trading culture was Craig Coats Jr., a tall, handsome, charismatic stud believed by many to be the model for the hero in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Coats ran Salomon’s government-bond trading the old-fashioned way: While Meriwether’s professors debated whether the relationship between two bonds was out of its normal range, or whether the volatility of a bond price was likely to decelerate, Coats’s main tool was a firm belief in his own instincts.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

From tranquility to breakdown To a neoclassical economist, the most striking aspect of the Great Recession was the speed with which apparent tranquility gave way to sudden breakdown. With notable, noble exceptions like Nouriel Roubini, Robert Shiller, Joe Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, economists paid little attention to the obvious Bonfire of the Vanities taking place in asset markets, so in a sense they didn’t see the warning signs, which were obvious to many others, that this would all end in tears. My model, in contrast, is one in which the Great Moderation and the Great Recession are merely different phases in the same process of debt-financed speculation, which causes a period of initial volatility to give way to damped oscillations as rising debt transfers income from workers to bankers, and then total breakdown occurs when debt reaches a level at which capitalists become insolvent.


pages: 388 words: 211,074

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

The faces of its subjects verge on bemusement, and the dove, representing the Holy Spirit, seems to fly into viewers’ faces. 09_308691-ch05.qxp 146 u 12/23/08 Chapter 5 9:17 PM Page 146 Why You’re Here: The Sights of London In his later years, Sandro Botticelli fell under the spell of the hardline reformer Savonarola. He burned many of his finest paintings in the Bonfire of the Vanities and changed to an inferior style, so his best works are rare; Venus and Mars (1485, room 58), depicting the lovers reclining, is one of them, and it’s in a room full of others. The Main Building The Gallery has four Michelangelos. The Entombment (around 1500, room 8) is unfinished but one of the most powerful.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

Michelangelo took religion seriously, and had admired and respected Savonarola, but revolutionary Florence was no place for a young artist, especially not one who had been so close to the Medici. Savonarola’s followers, the so-called ‘weepers’, or piagnoni, controlled the city. In the new purified republic there was to be no room for frivolous aestheticism and pagan dalliances. Savonarola held ceremonial ‘bonfires of the vanities’, on which were incinerated great piles of profane literature and art. In 1496, after two unsettled years spent between Florence, Venice and Bologna, the twenty-one-year-old Michelangelo set off for a city where artists were in ever greater demand: Rome. Michelangelo first attracted the attention of Roman connoisseurs by his mastery of the techniques of ancient art.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

GLENN GORDON CARON, Writer and Director: I came out to California in ’79 and my agent was Elliot Webb, who at that time was at ICM. I’d always been with Elliot and felt this tremendous sense of loyalty to him. ELLIOT WEBB: Terry Semel was close to Ovitz at that time and approved Glenn to write Bonfire of the Vanities, but Glenn wanted to write it and direct it. That started off a whirlwind romance with CAA because Ovitz had that information and he used it to his best advantage. Glenn was making a leap into motion pictures and I was pretty much in the television business. He wrote and was directing the Michael Keaton movie Clean and Sober.


pages: 920 words: 237,085

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017 by Rick Steves

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon footprint, Dava Sobel, Google Hangouts, index card, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wikimedia commons, young professional

While the monk/painter was trained in the medieval religious style, he also learned and adopted Renaissance techniques and sensibilities, producing works that blended Christian symbols and Renaissance realism. Don’t miss the cell of Savonarola, the charismatic monk who rode in from the Christian right, threw out the Medici, turned Florence into a theocracy, sponsored “bonfires of the vanities” (burning books, paintings, and so on), and was finally burned himself when Florence decided to change channels. Cost and Hours: €4, free and crowded on first Sun of the month, covered by Firenze Card, Tue-Fri 8:15-13:50, Sat 8:15-16:50; also open 8:15-13:50 on first, third, and fifth Mon and 8:15-16:50 on second and fourth Sun of each month; reservations possible but unnecessary, on Piazza San Marco, tel. 055-238-8608.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

As I mentioned in chapter 2, the human moral sense is not particularly moral; it encourages dehumanization (“politicians are pigs”) and punitive aggression (“make the polluters pay”). Also, by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.58 In many cultures people flaunt their righteousness with vows of fasting, chastity, self-abnegation, bonfires of the vanities, and animal (or sometimes human) sacrifice. Even in modern societies—according to studies I’ve done with the psychologists Jason Nemirow, Max Krasnow, and Rhea Howard—people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.59 Much of the public chatter about mitigating climate change involves voluntary sacrifices like recycling, reducing food miles, unplugging chargers, and so on.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

A withering, deftly drawn picture of New York high society at the turn of the twentieth century and how rigid social convention keeps two sensitive, ill-fated lovers apart. See also Wharton’s astounding House of Mirth and her classic stories Old New York. Paul Rudnick Social Disease. Hilarious, often incredible send-up of Manhattan night-owls. Very New York, very funny. Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities. Set all around New York City, this sprawling novel skewers 1980s statusmongers to great effect. 445 New York on film ith its skyline and rugged facades, its mean streets and swanky avenues, its electric energy and edgy attitude, New York City is a natural-born movie star. From the silent era’s cautionary tales of young lovers ground down by the metropolis, through the smoky location-shot noirs of the 1940s, right through to the Lower East Side indies of the past twenty years, New York has probably been the most filmed city on earth.


pages: 1,169 words: 342,959

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, illegal immigration, margin call, millennium bug, out of africa, place-making, plutocrats, rent control, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, the market place, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban renewal, white picket fence, Y2K, young professional

The market and all the service industries, including the law firms, that went with it. In ’84, the market had experienced its first million share trading day. Traders, brokers, anyone dealing in shares or bonds had the opportunity to make a fortune. It was all beautifully summarized in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which had just hit the best-seller lists as Maggie’s pregnancy began. Greed was everywhere. Greed was exciting. Successful greedy men were heroes. Greed was good. But Gorham had to ask himself: Had he been greedy enough? Sometimes, sitting in his office, he’d take out the silver Morgan dollar his grandmother had given him and stare at it sadly.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Childs came with one of his SOM partners and John “Janno” Lieber, Silverstein executive in charge of the Trade Center project. Libeskind came with his lawyer, Edward W. Hayes, a hard-charging incisive veteran of political battles, who was a model for the lawyer Tommy Killian in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Hayes understood the dynamic of power after being around the city’s development battles for thirty-five years. His job, he said, was to lead Libeskind “though the jungles of New York without getting ambushed and eaten alive.” On what was ahead, he was razor-sharp: “There are people that reach positions of power, and as far as they’re concerned, we’re just players on a chessboard.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Urbanites quit other American cities in droves, leaving burned-out cores surrounded by rings of suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities. Books, movies, and television series used intractable urban violence as their backdrop, including Little Murders, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Fort Apache the Bronx, Hill Street Blues, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Women enrolled in self-defense courses to learn how to walk with a defiant gait, to use their keys, pencils, and spike heels as weapons, and to execute karate chops or jujitsu throws to overpower an attacker, role-played by a volunteer in a Michelinman-tire suit. Red-bereted Guardian Angels patrolled the parks and the transit system, and in 1984 Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

In New York, their righteously indignant neighbors sued them when an allegedly unauthorized crane appeared on their penthouse terrace to hoist a twenty-two-foot, five-hundred-pound Christmas tree into the Gutfreunds’ living room.68 Thus did Susan Gutfreund become 1980s Nouvelle Society’s most beloved object of parody. The Gutfreunds graced magazine covers and Susan earned a role in Tom Wolfe’s roman à clef, The Bonfire of the Vanities.69 Susan’s friends defended her, but however overdone the satire might be, nobody, not even her husband, questioned that this outpouring of opulence had diverted his attention, at least a little bit.70 A corporate history published around this time included a telling remark. Instead of making a decision and expecting others to follow, it said Gutfreund “liked to involve the people who would be affected” and “would bend over backward to make them comfortable with what was to be done.”


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

His bloodcurdling warnings of horrors to come if Florentines did not renounce their evil ways somehow captured everyone’s imagination and the city now submitted to a fiery theocracy. He called on the government to act on the basis of his divine inspiration. Drinking, whoring, partying, gambling, wearing flashy clothes and other signs of wrongdoing were pushed well underground. Books, clothes, jewellery, fancy furnishings and art were burned on ‘bonfires of the vanities’. Bands of children marched around the city ferreting out adults still attached to their old habits and possessions. Pleasure-loving Florentines soon began to tire of this fundamentalism, as did Pope Alexander VI (possibly the least religiously inclined pope of all time) and the rival Franciscan religious order.