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John Meriwether starred in two of the best books ever written about the financial world: Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker and Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed.
In the first, he was the ice-cool head of Salomon Brothers' bond arbitrage desk who would casually bet millions of dollars on a game of bluff using the serial numbers on dollar bills. In the second, he founded the most famous hedge fund blow-up of all time, Long Term Capital Management, whose demise in 1998 shook the financial system.
Now he is in the news again as his latest firm, JWM Partners, joins the growing list of hedge funds closing down. The firm's main fund has lost 44% in the past two years, having returned an average of 1.46% a year since 1999.
Meriwether is the yeti of New York finance: much discussed but little known. He grew up in Chicago, and joined Salomon in the mid-1970s. He was reported to have a preternatural gift for pricing bonds, and led Salomon into the then nascent business of bond arbitrage. In the 1980s, this became a bonanza for the bank, though it led to a trading scandal that all but sank the firm.
Meriwether then set up Long Term Capital Management, skimming the cream of bond traders, a couple of Nobel laureates in economics and $1.3 billion in capital to start operating in 1994. It was the iconic hedge fund of its time, returning over 40% to investors in its best years.
In 1998, however, its highly leveraged trades came undone with the Russian financial crisis. It lost $4.6 billion in a matter of months and the Federal Reserve organised a bailout.
Meriwether is now 61, a near scratch golfer, and surely doesn't need the money. But it's hard to imagine the champion of Liar's Poker staying on the sidelines for long.
Steven Cohen, a still-thriving hedge-fund billionaire, has paid $2.7 million for an apartment for his twentysomething son. "Paltrier than princedoms of yore," crowed the New York Observer, comparing it unfavourably with apartments bought for other hedge-fund heirs, and noting it was a third of what Cohen paid for Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde.
Call it the curse of New York. Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, is struggling to keep investors at his fund, Clarium Capital Management. Until last year, he operated from San Francisco. Since he moved his operation to Manhattan to be closer to the financial action, his assets under management have fallen by two thirds.
