For many of those rooms, the grand room, the relations room, you wish a hundred to one hundred fifty yards of material. That’s no longer unusual. Cotton materials are $40 to $60 a backyard on commonplace, yet lots of the ones we glance at, the outstanding silks, are $100 a backyard. ” thus far, the curtains for only one room have are available at $20,000 to $25,000. —“Greenwich’s Outrageous Fortune,” self-importance reasonable, July 2006 IN 2006, earlier than the economy began to come aside on the seams, Nina Munk wrote a piece of writing for self-importance reasonable in regards to the mansion-building spree then occurring in Greenwich, Connecticut. As she famous, Greenwich were a favourite hang-out of tycoons within the early 20th century, a spot the place the creators or inheritors of commercial fortunes outfitted mansions “to rival the palazzi and châteaux and stately houses of Europe. ” Post–World struggle II the US was once, although, a spot the place few humans might manage to pay for to maintain a twenty-five-room mansion; little by little, the nice estates have been damaged up and offered off. Then the hedge fund managers began relocating in. a lot of the monetary is, in fact, focused in Wall road (and within the urban of London, which performs an analogous role). yet hedge funds—which primarily speculate with borrowed funds, and which magnetize traders who wish that their managers have the specified perception it takes to make a killing—have congregated in Greenwich, that's a couple of forty-minute teach journey from big apple. The managers of these cash have earning as sizeable as or larger than these of the robber barons of yore, even after adjusting for inflation. In 2006 the twenty-five highest-paid hedge fund managers made $14 billion, 3 times the mixed salaries of recent York City’s 80 thousand schoolteachers. while such males made up our minds to shop for homes in Greenwich, expense used to be no item. They cheerfully got up the previous Gilded Age mansions, and in lots of circumstances knocked them all the way down to construct even greater palaces. How colossal? in line with Munk, the common new domestic bought through a hedge fund supervisor used to be round 15,000 sq. ft. One supervisor, Larry Feinberg of Oracle companions, a hedge fund focusing on the health and wellbeing care undefined, acquired a $20 million domestic just to knock it down; his development plans, filed with the city, known as for a 30,771-square-foot villa. As Munk helpfully famous, that’s in basic terms a bit smaller than the Taj Mahal. yet why should still we care? Is it simply prurient curiosity? good, I can’t deny that there's a sure fascination in studying approximately life of the wealthy and fatuous. yet there’s a bigger aspect right here to boot. I famous on the finish of bankruptcy four that even sooner than the drawback of 2008 it used to be demanding to work out why monetary deregulation used to be thought of a hit tale. The rate reductions and mortgage mess had supplied a dear demonstration of ways deregulated bankers might run wild; there have been near-misses that foreshadowed the drawback to return; and fiscal progress had, if whatever, been reduce within the period of deregulation than it were within the period of tight law. but there has been (and nonetheless is) a wierd myth between a few commentators—by and big, even though no longer fullyyt, at the political right—that the period of deregulation was once certainly one of financial triumph.