“Well. I don’t—”

“Of course you don’t. Why should you? Right? He’s the one who’s president of the board, and so why should—” He stopped abruptly.

“Well, in any event—”

He trampled the any event too.

“When we moved into this building, we were told this was a first-class building. We were told this building was ‘prewar.’ That’s all we kept hearing, ‘prewar,’ and they don’t build them like this anymore. Okay? But they didn’t tell us it also has a bunch of obsolete rules that are prewar too. Prehistoric is more like it, if you want my candid opinion.”

“I’m afraid that’s not—”

The that’s not got flattened. “The board of this building is like quicksand. You put one toe in”—he lifted one of his weapons and pointed the toe down with a mock prissiness—“and it SUCKS YOU ALL THE WAY IN UP TO YOUR ARMPITS, AND YOU CAN’T MOVE! AND I’LL TELL YOU ANOTHER THING: IT’S NO USE TRYING TO BE NICE AND ACCOMMODATING AND REASONABLE IN THIS BUILDING! WE TRIED THAT, AND YOU CAN SEE HOW FAR IT GOT US! NEW WINDOWS, WHICH WOULD IMPROVE THE FREAKING BUILDING, AND FOUR LOUSY LITTLE DUCTS IS ALL WE’RE TALKING ABOUT. LOOK, WHETHER ANY OF YOU PEOPLE LIKE IT OR NOT, WE LIVE HERE. I PAID A FREAKING FORTUNE FOR THAT APARTMENT! OKAY? THAT’S WHERE WE LIVE, AND YOU PEOPLE ARE RUINING IT FOR US! TELL HIM THAT! Okay?”

She shut the door in his face. She was indignant, but that wasn’t the reason she shut the door. She shut the door because she was afraid. The man was beginning to sizzle like a fuse, and she didn’t want his face to be in hers when he exploded.

A few days later, she happened to be sitting in her study recounting this story to an acquaintance. She asked him, “What do you suppose he meant by all this ‘you people’ business? It’s like they all have a big chip on their shoulder. What is it that makes these people so angry and nasty?”

These people are hedge fund managers such as the bratwurst in blue jeans we just met, private equity fund managers (who have become increasingly indistinguishable from hedge fund managers), stock and bond traders (but nobody else in the investment banking firms they work for—especially not that pathetic creature the C.E.O.), and various lone-wolf entrepreneurs such as real estate developers. Everybody who cares at all knows their occupations, but what’s their problem?

There are some heavy-hitting Medicare-qualified hedge fund managers, notably Carl Icahn, 71, and the home run king, T. Boone Pickens, 78, who made $1.5 billion—personally—in a single year, 2005. But most of these people are in their late thirties and early to mid forties. For men making, in many cases, tens of millions and up per year, they qualify as young. They talk about business in young-warrior metaphors: “pulling the trigger” (making huge risky bets on the market); “mowing them all down” (overpowering companies that try to block your strategies); “This is war!” (get out of my way—or else I’ll make you suffer); “Surrender your booty!” (I’m a corporate raider poised to take over your company); “We don’t eat what we don’t kill” (if you, the investor, don’t make a profit, then we in the hedge fund’s management don’t take a profit ourselves, something oddly true in spirit although, as we shall soon see, not in fact). These people tend to be bright and well-educated, many at Harvard, Princeton, and other top-ranked colleges. They come from well-educated families. They still enjoy the virgin animal health of youth. They are flush with optimism and confidence, as well as money. With all that going for them, what inna nameagod is their problem?

THE BAFFLEMENT REACHES ITS PEAK IN New York City’s Connecticut commuter towns, Stamford, Norwalk, Westport, and especially Greenwich. With its manicured-bucolic wildernessless-woodsy rolling hills and arboreal dells, all ornamented by mansions and irrigated by cash flow, Greenwich is now headquarters for more than 100 hedge funds handling just about $100 billion, nearly one-tenth of all hedge fund money in the world. This town of 62,000 has become the Wall Street of hedge funds.

The collision of new money and old money or, to be more accurate in our American context, slightly older money, has been a recurring drama. At the turn of the 20th century, Edith Wharton established herself as perhaps America’s greatest female novelist by focusing on precisely that. But the current new breed stands apart from all the rest for two reasons.

First, they have more money, infinitely more, than any of the various waves of new money that preceded them, with the possible exception of robber barons on the order of John D. Rockefeller, who, incidentally, was regarded as a rude Pocantico hillbilly Baptist by society in New York a hundred years ago. Hedge funds have what investment managers call “the greatest business plan of all time,” known as “2 and 20.” Each year the typical fund takes 20 percent of the return plus 2 percent of the total investments. Some of the hottest managers, such as Icahn and Stevie Cohen, reportedly take 50 percent of the profits.