“When you get there, you’ve arrived.” — New York Times headline in 1971 referring to Greenwich, CT

It seems that McMansions are still a hot topic these days. Recently, Jeff Collins at the Orange County Register reported, “For sale: modern Corona del Mar (Newport Beach) beauty, featuring state-of-the art electronics, a water treatment system, three pools, two spas, eight bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. Oh, and a bowling alley, vintage movie theater, cafà ©, gymnasium, auto museum, wine cellar behind a bank-vault door and just under an acre of beachfront land.”

“Asking price? $75 million.”

“That makes Portabello, as the mansion is known, one of the three most expensive residences currently for sale in America.”

With B-I-G on the minds of Americans, Vanity Fair asked the question: How Much Land Does a Man Need? In its July issue, Nina Munk writes about how the wealth of hedge funds managers has taken over Greenwich, Connecticut.

Actually I’m one of those people that never really understood what a hedge fund was until Vanity Fair provided this concise three-paragraph definition, “A hedge fund hedges its bets against market volatility by taking both ‘long’ positions on undervalued stocks, hoping they would go up, and ‘short’ positions on overvalued stocks, hoping they would go down.”

“Unlike mutual funds, which are strictly regulated under the Investment Company Act of 1940, hedge funds have never had restrictions on the investments they make: they can buy stock options, for example, or use leverage. Basically, hedge funds can do whatever they want without government intervention because their clients, who typically must invest $1 million or more, are thought to be richer and more sophisticated than the average investor.”

“What really defines a hedge fund”and therefore defines the wealth of Greenwich”is how its managers get paid. The typical hedge fund charges its investors an annual management fee of 2 percent of assets under management”plus a performance fee equal to 20 percent of that year’s return. In other words, just for showing up at work, the manager of a midsize hedge fund with $2 billion in assets is guaranteed to earn $40 million a year in fees alone. That’s before his cut of any returns.”

Forty million dollars a year… I can only imagine what kind of castle comes with this kind of wealth. Greenwich is learning and like the oversized monstrosity in for sale in Newport Beach, it’s creating quite a neighborhood stir.

Case in point: Joseph Jacobs a founding partner of a hedge fund called Wexford Capital is unapologetic. “America’s a great country. I’ve worked hard. I’ve made a few bucks. So I want to build a house for myself. Is that so wrong?”

The house he built is a 30,000-square-foot house… “To be precise, the new house Jacobs hopes to build in Greenwich is 32,114 square feet, plus a 1,165-square-foot pool house.” Another guy is building a house with an ice rink about the size of the one at Rockefeller Center. Someone interviewed for the article said, “You’d be happy to live in the Zamboni house.” They were referring to the 720-square-foot shingle cottage that houses the ice-resurfacing machine.

All this begs the question: when is enough, enough? Nutty stuff to consider as we approach the Monday morning commute.