Slate- Popular culture, which is created by some of the least business-savvy people on the planet, has always been slow to latch onto business and economic trends. The covers of large-circulation magazines are a good contrary indicator. And TV, movies, and books are even worse.

Twelve to 15 months can elapse between the first formal pitch of a new sitcom and the debut of the pilot. With movies and books, the lead times are even longer. By the time the film hits the multiplex or the book shows up on Amazon, the business phenomenon it describes has frequently gone bust—which is why hedge-fund managers and their investment-banking cousins should be very worried about the onslaught of Wall Street-themed pop culture.

We’ve seen this before. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities timed the zeitgeist—and the market—perfectly, debuting in October 1987, the month the 1980s bull market came to a crashing end. But Oliver Stone’s Wall Street didn’t hit the theaters until December 1987 and tanked at the box office as a result. After a few punk years, Wall Street caught fire again in the mid-1990s.

But programming executives didn’t catch on to the new wave until much later. Darren Star, who had neatly captured a cultural moment with HBO’s Sex and the City, rolled out The $treet on Fox in the fall of 2000. This show about the professional and personal lives of attractive employees at a New York brokerage firm arrived at a time when Wall Street was falling out of favor, and lasted just 12 episodes, one more than Bull, which was also about the professional and personal lives of attractive employees at a New York brokerage.

The real-estate bubble produced the ABC sitcom Hot Properties, a bawdy sendup of the lives of four attractive real-estate brokers. It debuted in the fall of 2005, just as housing prices were about to peak, and went into foreclosure after 13 unfunny episodes.

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