HONG KONG  - Tom Wolfe outlived his Masters of the Universe. The famously dapper author and journalist, who has died at 88, coined the term in his 1987 debut novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities”, depicting the rising wealth and clout on Wall Street. Since then, the real-life analogues to his antihero Sherman McCoy have been chastened.

Investment bankers – just one of the many subcultures dissected by Wolfe – have fallen earthward gradually. In the Noughties, the power centre moved northward, as Wolfe himself noted, from lower Manhattan to Greenwich, Connecticut, where hedge funds set up shop. Their size, smarts and aggression made the sell-side look pedestrian.

The financial crisis continued the trend, ensuring banking became tamer, less prestigious and not quite so lavishly paid. Betting $6 billion to earn "two ticks," or one-sixteenth of a percent, as McCoy’s shop Pierce & Pierce does in “Bonfire”, would not be looked upon kindly by the modern risk committee.

Trading and investment banking still pay handsomely, of course, and financiers wield considerable sway even today. Goldman Sachs alumni preside over the U.S. Treasury and central banks in Frankfurt and London. But they are no longer masters of all that they survey.

Technology also has changed the equation in two important ways. First, it is disrupting banking, just like every other profession. That McCoy could earn a $50,000 commission on a single zero-coupon bond trade by phone helped convince him of his own prowess. So-called “voice broking” is on the way out, though, and the robots are coming for investment-banking jobs, too.

Second, tech outfits from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen control today’s truly astronomical fortunes and business empires. And the industry’s ambition – and in many cases, hubris – often outdoes Wall Street at its most flamboyant.

That cries out for a latter-day Wolfe. There is no shortage of tales of tech-land, but nothing yet has caught the moment quite like Wolfe did with his Masters of the Universe, or as his journalistic heir Michael Lewis has done with “Liar’s Poker” or “The Big Short”. The bar for capturing the financial zeitgeist has been set high by the man in the white suit.

CONTEXT NEWS

- Author and journalist Tom Wolfe has died at 88, his agent told Reuters on May 15. His books included "The Bonfire of the Vanities," "The Right Stuff," "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," and "A Man in Full."

(Editing by Jeffrey Goldfarb and Katrina Hamlin)

© Reuters News 2018