1980s Wall Street was as inventive as it was ostentatious. New kinds of deal turned the relationship between finance and society on its head: collateralized mortgage obligations made homeowners into raw material for profit, while the leveraged buyout allowed corporate raiders to tear up companies in the name of shareholder value, all this backed by the new science of financial economics. This episode takes a random walk around some of finance’s most rapacious innovations.

Transcript

The investment-banking firm of Pierce & Pierce occupied the fiftieth, fifty-first, fifty-second, fifty-third, and fifty-fourth floors of a glass tower that rose up sixty stories from out of the gloomy groin of Wall Street. The bond trading room, where Sherman worked, was on the fiftieth. Every day he stepped out of an aluminum-walled elevator into what looked like the reception area of one of those new London hotels catering to the Yanks. Near the elevator door was a fake fireplace and an antique mahogany mantelpiece with great bunches of fruit carved on each corner. Out in front of the fake fireplace was a brass fence or fender, as they called it in country homes in the west of England. In the appropriate months a fake fire glowed within, casting flickering lights upon a prodigious pair of brass andirons. The wall surrounding it was covered in more mahogany, rich and reddish, done in linen-fold panels carved so deep, you could feel the expense in the tips of your fingers by just looking at them. All of this reflected the passion of Pierce & Pierce’s chief executive officer, Eugene Lopwitz, for things British. Things British, library ladders, bow-front consoles, Sheraton legs, Chippendale backs, cigar cutters, tufted club chairs, Wilton-weave carpet were multiplying on the fiftieth floor at Pierce & Pierce day by day. Alas, there wasn’t much Eugene Lopwitz could do about the ceiling, which was barely eight feet above the floor. The floor had been raised one foot. Beneath it ran enough cables and wires to electrify Guatemala. The wires provided the power for the computer terminals and telephones of the bond trading room. The ceiling had been lowered one foot, to make room for light housings and air-conditioning ducts and a few more miles of wire. The floor had risen; the ceiling had descended; it was as if you were in an English mansion that had been squashed.

This is Tom Wolfe, of course, from his remarkable Bonfire of the Vanities, as we first encounter the workplace of the protagonist – I won’t say hero, for he’s certainly not that – master of the universe, possessor of a Yale chin – Sherman McCoy. It turns out that this kitsch Englishness is just the drapery on something much more primal. Wolfe continues…

No sooner did you pass the fake fireplace than you heard an ungodly roar, like the roar of a mob. It came from somewhere around the corner. You couldn’t miss it. Sherman McCoy headed straight for it, with relish.

On this particular morning, as on every morning, it resonated with his very gizzard. He turned the corner, and there it was: the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce. It was a vast space, perhaps sixty by eighty feet, but with the same eight-foot ceiling bearing down on your head. It was an oppressive space with a ferocious glare, writhing silhouettes, and the roar. The glare came from a wall of plate glass that faced south, looking out over New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Brooklyn and New Jersey shores. The writhing silhouettes were the arms and torsos of young men, few of them older than forty. They had their suit jackets off. They were moving about in an agitated manner and sweating early in the morning and shouting, which created the roar. It was the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.

The sound of well-educated young white men baying for money.

Wolfe, already a famous long-form journalist,