Meanwhile, most writers' grasp of it remains stuck in the late 19th century. The new-model City still cries out for its Trollope or its Dickens, or for a British rival to Tom Wolfe. After all, a London hedge-fund manager notoriously spent £36,000 on a bar bill a few weeks ago. The stories, and the characters, are just begging for a clever chronicler.
Eighty years on, the great Jay Gatsby would surely be running a hedge fund.At least three of the shortlisted titles competing for Man's largesse on Monday showed a sure touch with the inside of some complex institutions: Julian Barnes's Arthur & George, with the Edwardian legal system; Zadie Smith's On Beauty, with the Ivy League US university; and Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way, with the police and army of the First World War era. The Economist thinks such funds represent "a new source of risk to the financial system as a whole" In 1998, the $4.6bn. failure of the hilariously mistitled "Long-Term Capital Management" fund prompted emergency action by the Fed and US banks to prevent a wider meltdown. More recently, hedge-fund secrecy came under scrutiny as two bosses of the Bayou Funds pleaded guilty in New York last month to several fraud and conspiracy charges.Financial capitalism - ie, the institutions that handle the savings, pensions and investments of most of us - has moved on by electronic leaps and bounds. Many observers now worry that the hedge-fund fleet - with Man as its UK flagship - has too much power, with too little responsibility, on the oceans of global finance. in assets - aims via its "cornerstone" hedge-fund business to make money in falling as well as rising markets, bucking trends and defying cycles in a fast-moving, lightly-regulated sector as it pursues "absolute returns" for investors. Yet I (at least) find it immensely fascinating that the fate of English-language fiction's most widely discussed honour should now be so closely bound up with the secretive, volatile and deeply controversial world of hedge funds and "alternative investments". The Man Group - which manages $44bn.
Man, which has not been charged with any wrongdoing, has disputed the receiver's interpretation and is "cooperating fully" with the SEC inquiry It has suspended one of its brokers in New York. All this sounds a long way from the fancy frocks, fixed grins and TV lights of the Guildhall. Fiscally innocent literati tend to grab whatever crumbs of patronage they can from open-handed City folk without bothering their sensitive heads about the source of the loot. A troubled week for the Man Booker Prize - and not simply because the panel of judges, after surveying the treasure-laden mountain of this year's finest fiction, brought forth the prissy little mouse of John Banville's The Sea. That miracle of misjudgement will damage the standing of the award.