Big Swinging Dicks and Masters of the Universe

Still used? Well, perhaps I don't hang out with the right folks, but I have never hard the first one, and whereas I can imagine someone using the second one, I can't recall actually running into it.

I assume MMB is looking for a term that doesn't just mean a financier, but implies an aggressive, arrogant tycoon who throws his weight around & doesn't care wh gets trampled on (or foreclosed on).

Fro Slate Magazine
>In New York, happiest among the financial alpha males is the big swinging dick. The term entered the lingua franca via Michael Lewis'[book] Liar's Poker. (Relevant quote: "If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.") BSDs are the perennial winners of the game of conspicuous earnings (giant bonuses), conspicuous consumption (giant co-ops and summer homes), and conspicuous philanthropy (giant plaques on public edifices).

Based on that & a few other places I looked, I'd say that BSD is financial industry jargon that isn't much used outside of the industry.

Michael Lewis's BSDs weren't tycoons. They were bond salesmen, in particular bond salesmen who had succeeded in unloading a large amount of crappy debentures.

Neither term is gender-neutral and they may be disfavored today on that account.

You never hear about the gnomes of Zurich anymore.

I'd never heard of the gnomes of Zurich before, either.

But a lightly just went on. I'll bet the goblins that run Gringotts were inspired by the term "gnomes of Zurich."

I have been pretty dense in general about wordplay in Harry Potter. It wasn't until maybe the third book that I figured out Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley.

Tom Wolfe dubbed the NY traders 'Masters of the Universe' in his book 'Bonfire of the Vanities', 1987.

#6 That was my frame of reference..

If you pulled the term out of a novel, then it probably a phrase coined by the author that, as far as I know, has never been used in common speech.

It's a phrase from a novel that entered common parlance. I'm trying to find out if it left common parlance.

There is a book published in June 2010 called Chasing Goldman Sachs: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down . . . And Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again. And one published August 2011 called Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk. A subhead in the Financial Times February 2012 reads:

Some 40,000 high-level bankers lost their jobs in the financial crisis. But questions on what the former Masters of the Universe did next are met with impenetrable silence.

So it seems to have survived the great financia crisis, at least in the financial press.