“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 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…The room was like a newspaper city room in that there were no partitions and no signs of visible rank. Everyone sat at light gray metal desks in front of veal-colored computer terminals with black screens. Rows of green-diode letters and numbers came skidding across.”
Thus Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) described a Wall Street trading room.
The images of Wall Street in the eighties are forever engraved on the public consciousness. Besides the young men screaming at trading desks, there is the executive with his car phone in the back seat of a black stretch limousine flying through Manhattan’s streets; a corporate raider with slick-backed hair and suspenders over a striped shirt pontificating while staring out of the plate glass window; exultant brokers running around the New York Stock Exchange floor surrounded by crumpled order sheets. The images convey ambition and excitement in equal measure.
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