While not definitive, it is likely that the corporate culture of Salomon Brothers created the environment for the U.S treasury bonds scandal. While Salomon Smith Barney became notorious by the early 1990s for a collective "alpha male" mentality present among its employees and "a cutthroat corporate culture that rewarded risk-taking with massive bonuses, punishing poor results with a swift boot." The firm's top bond traders called themselves "Big Swinging Dicks," and were the inspiration for the book "The Bonfire of the Vanities", by Tom Wolfe. The expression "Big Swinging Dick(s)" itself was used to refer to the Salomon bankers who dominated the game of extraordinary profit-making.