CONTENTS ● The problem with ● An ETF for those who ● How Southeast Asia’s
3
brokers holding sway lean Trump-ward
over their assistants’ pay
Remembering
Tom Wolfe
● His novels captured the spirit
of Wall Street’s extraordinary
new Gilded Age. The mystery is
why so few have emulated him
There are many reasons to praise Tom Wolfe, both
as a novelist and as a journalist. If Charles Dickens
defined Victorian London, then the capital of the
world, Wolfe, who died on May 14 at 88, held up
a similar mirror to modern America—and New
York in particular. One of Wolfe’s less ­celebrated
­achievements was that he was a great novelist
of finance—the only one that this frenzied era of
­moneymaking has produced.
The Bonfire of the Vanities was arguably the first
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY/ISTOCK
great financial novel since Anthony Trollope’s The
Way We Live Now. Many eminent American writ-
ers have looked at the victims of Wall Street and
broader capitalism, including Sinclair Lewis and
John Steinbeck. But Wolfe was the first American
biggest bank is fighting
fintech with fintech
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one to look at the victors—the “Masters of the
Universe”—like Sherman McCoy, who sold bonds
for a living. Bonfire drills into their lives, their
­hangups and petty ambitions, enumerating their
virtues and vices often literally (saying how much
their clothes, apartments, and lunches cost).
Looking back, especially through the harsh
lens of the 2008 financial crisis, it’s strange how
­sympathetic Wolfe was to Sherman McCoy. This
is a r­ elative judgment: We first meet Sherman
­kneeling on the floor pathetically trying to put
a leash on a dachshund, and Wolfe skewers the
bond ­trader’s insecurities about “going broke on
$1 ­million a year”—just as he savages the “social
X-rays” and freeloading English journalists. But
as that implies, it’s equal-opportunity skewering.
McCoy is a much more nuanced character than,
say, Augustus Melmotte, the villainous French
antihero of The Way We Live Now (which Trollope
May 21, 2018
partly based on the Crédit Mobilier scandal), let
alone the c­ artoonish Gordon Gekko in Oliver Edited by
Pat Regnier
Stone’s Wall Street.
Wolfe spent time on trading floors, tried to Businessweek.com
 ◼ FINANCE Bloomberg Businessweek May 21, 2018

explain the excitement of the deal—and the
all-American sorts who greedily and weakly end
up being swept away by it. He gave Charlie Croker,
the Atlanta real estate developer in A Man in Full, a
similarly rounded treatment.
In some ways the remarkable thing is not that
Wolfe wrote about finance in this fashion but that
so few people have followed him. Out of all the
amazing things that have happened to America
in the past half-century, the rise of Wall Street—
and the creation of wealth through what Trollope
called “the manufacturing of shares”—is one of the
most incredible. And yet what great fiction is there
to catalog this era?
Some would point to the TV show Billions,
which looks at hedge funds. And some would
say that John Lanchester’s Capital was a British
Bonfire. Modern American writers from Bret
Easton Ellis to Jonathan Franzen have looked at
the consequences of this new Gilded Age—in the
same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the
vanities of the previous epoch. But American fic-
tion has not followed Wolfe onto the trading floor,
not dived into the mechanics of money and its
effect on society, in the same way that Dickens
and Victor Hugo did in a different age.
The best books about modern finance have
been nonfiction—like Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker
and The Big Short. All our lives have been shaped ● The first-edition cover
of Bonfire
by finance and economics, and yet hardly any-
one has found a way to use fiction as a vehicle to
explore these things. Whatever you think, Wolfe
leaves a big space behind him. �John Micklethwait
THE BOTTOM LINE Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities was the
first great financial novel since Trollope’s The Way We Live Now,
providing a biting view of the “Masters of the Universe.”

Harassment at the
Broker’s Office
26
● Top producers have
power over part of their
assistants’ pay

He was one of Morgan Stanley’s top financial advis-

ers in Beverly Hills. She was a Brazilian waitress
and bartender at an L.A. Sports Club. He asked her
to fly to Brazil to work as a translator for him and
one of his celebrity clients, pop star Katy Perry, she
recalls. He then offered her entree into the securi-
ties industry as an administrative assistant.
In March, the assistant, Lorena Alcantara,
accused the adviser, Michael Ladge, of sexual
harassment, saying he had an ulterior motive for
hiring someone with no administrative experience
and limited English skills. Ladge’s real purpose
“was to try to exploit his power with Alcantara, to
subject her to demeaning and harassing behavior,
to use her beauty to attract clients, and to pursue
a ­sexual relationship with her,” her attorney wrote
in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Ladge, a member of Morgan Stanley’s elite
“Master’s Club” for top advisers, showed Alcantara spokeswoman Christine Jockle, who says the com-
pictures of his sex partners, including prostitutes, pany “plans on vigorously defending itself.” The
according to her complaint. In a sworn statement case is going through arbitration.
filed with her suit, another former administrative As they have through the age of the telegraph,
assistant corroborated much of her account. Ladge the ticker, and the computer terminal, the nation’s
denies wrongdoing, according to Morgan Stanley now more than 600,000 securities brokers, most
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