While writing about economics in Ecuador for a nonprofit think tank, Peter Mountford noticed his byline read “senior associate” for a hedge fund he’d never heard of. It turned out the think tank was running the hedge fund out of its back office—inspiration for A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. Mountford has lived in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles, as well as Scotland, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, and Southern Mexico. His fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2008, Boston Review, and Conjunctions.