Asia Times Online – In every decade, certain socio-cultural archetypes arise to become the avatars of their time. In the 1950s, there was the corporate “organization man” in his gray flannel suit; in the ’60s, the tie-dyed flower-power hippie. In the ’70s, there was the polyester-leisure-suited big-lapeled “est” sensitivity trainer, and in the ’80s, it would have been the Hugo Boss-wearing avaricious corporate raider. In the ’90s, we had the perpetually casual-Friday-looking ‘Net entrepreneur.
And for this decade? It can be none other than the international hedge-fund manager, who “bestrides the world like a colossus” (as William Shakespeare’s Cassius described Julius Caesar just before assassinating him), from offices looking out over Long Island Sound in Greenwich, Connecticut.
But has pride come before a very big fall? Recent events in the financial markets suggest that the answer could be yes.
On the real-estate pages of the New York Times, any story about the latest outrageous selling price of some co-op on the Upper West Side, or on the beach in St Barts, or the slopes of Vail is bound to have some reference to a hot hedge-fund manager as the purchaser. A new off-Broadway play, Burleigh Grime$, celebrates the wild ways of the title character, a hedge-fund manager who, in one of his more legitimate profit-making schemes, has dead fish dumped on the beaches of California to try to profit from an El Nino market panic.
