The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

These symptoms are not unique to Wall Street: other worlds also manifest them, politics for example. One particularly insightful account of political mania has been provided by David Owen, now Lord Owen. Owen, a former British foreign secretary and one of the founders of the UK Social Democratic Party, has spent most of his life at the very top of British politics. But he is by training a neurologist, and has lately taken to writing about a personality disorder he has observed among political and business leaders, a disorder he calls the hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, “can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.” The syndrome, he continues, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” The symptoms Owen describes sound strikingly similar to those I observed on Wall Street, and his account further suggests an important point—that the manic behavior displayed by many traders when on a winning streak comes from more than their newly acquired wealth. It comes equally, perhaps more, from a feeling of consummate power.