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Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
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Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
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Product details
Series: a John Hope Franklin Center Book
Paperback: 392 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books; unknown edition (July 13, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822345994
ISBN-13: 978-0822345992
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
54 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#295,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Karen Ho is an anthropologist who worked briefly for an investment bank on Wall Street in the 1990s. Her work was cut short by a downsizing, but she later returned to Wall Street to do field research for a PhD. Her topic: the culture of investment banking. Much of her research was based on interviews with relatively junior analysts and associates; eventually her dissertation was recycled into "Liquidated." The book is packed with interesting insider information about how investment bankers are recruited on Ivy League campuses, how they toil away like slaves in cubicles, and how their lives are warped by the values of greed, competition, and always looking smart. At one point the author says that investment bankers go through life "always looking for the next Harvard" -- which sums things up nicely. If some young person you know is thinking of a career on Wall Street, give him or her a copy of "Liquidated".The book debunks the myth that capitalist markets are like laws of nature, irresistible and beyond moral judgment. In reality, markets are made up of people who have ideologies, interests, networks, and power, all of which shape markets. It is hardly a coincidence, for example, that Wall Street's ideology of "shareholder value" and its mania for corporate restructuring dovetail nicely with the fee-based compensation system of investment bankers. Unfortunately, I couldn't give the book five stars. For one thing, it is dense with anthropological jargon. Even worse, it pretends to offer a grand theory of how finance has shaped global capitalism, even though the author lacked access to top Wall Street managers and to the big company CEOs in the "real economy" who supposedly bow to their demands. To understand how Wall Street fits into the broader economy, we need to know how the big dogs think and network, not the boys and girls in the cubes.
Karen Ho's Ethnography Liquidated begins with a dedication "For my daughter and son, Mira and August, in the hope that their generation will see greater socioeconomic equality." I'm not certain that Ho's work here will help create greater socioeconomic equality for the next generation, but reading this book will help you understand how the habitus of Wall Street investment bankers is reshaping the world you live in, and the results are frightening to consider.Liquidated is an ethnography of Wall Street and its tribe of investment bankers. Ho spent time "on the ground" working in an investment bank and used her contacts through this short time (six months) to collect interviews and data regarding how Wall Street views itself in relation to the rest of the world, the hierarchies they create, and how the Wall Street focus on short term profits without long term planning is seeping into corporate America and creating a breakdown of the cultural fabric. What Ho reports on is a fascinating world where the concepts of "smartness" (your academic pedigree) and "hard work" (working in excess of 100 hours each week for years) act as cultural cachet to develop a new vision of the working world. Emblems of the hierarchy created in this culture range from the absurd ("you shouldn't wear suspenders because it looks like you spent too much time on your appearance"[73]) to the very literal (tiered elevators only allow access to certain floors, thus creating segregation between "front" and "back" office employees). An investment banker is considered less a real person and more an interchangeable object based on the college they attended ("we have two MITs, three Princetons, two Whartons, and a Harvard guy" [257]). Ho's assertion in Liquidated is that government deregulation of banking standards (such as the Glass-Steagall Act) has given investment banking greater strength and allowed their practices to become commonplace in all forms of business. According to Ho, "the very influence of Wall Street...has generated not only record profits but also volatility, crisis, and a continual existence on the brink of annihilation" (10) for corporate America; this volatility has led to a constant instability of the economy. Investment bankers live in a world of "high risk/high reward", but this model is not transferrable to the majority of corporations and it's creating an unstable environment where the worth of employees is on par with the inventory of the office supply closet.The chapter entitled "Liquid Lives" was perhaps the most telling of the damage Wall Street is doing to our nation. Ho states:"empowered by their prestige and elite educational pedigrees, their experiences of hard work, the moral high ground and historical purchase of shareholder value, and their role as mouthpiece of investor capital, investment bankers learn to thrive in a corporate culture that is characterized by slash-and-burn expediency(252)."Investment bankers live in a culture of incredible volatility; they are interchangeable commodities, so massive layoffs are common in their industry and they have learned to adapt to this world. This mindset of a "slash-and-burn expediency" is being adopted by other corporations, with disastrous results. For Wall Street, employees are interchangeable and therefore liquid commodities that can be released to increase capital for short term gains. This is a portion of the culture that investment bankers are accommodated to, and they believe it is part of a natural evolution for business to proceed in this manner. Investment bankers are rewarded with large bonuses for the work they do, often in excess of $100,000 annually. When investment bankers are inevitably laid off they have a cushion from their bonuses to protect their livelihood until they find new employment. The problem with corporations adopting this model is that regular workers are not compensated as such, so when a company decides to lay off a department so the executive bonus will increase slightly, the people who are laid off do not have a cushion to protect them in the interim. Wall Street, not understanding the world outside their ivory towers, is unable to see how the concept of liquidity cannot apply to every corporation. Unfortunately Wall Street, and by extension the corporate executives these analysts advise, do not understand any concept besides money and are unable to see the damage they are causing to the world. Ho's assertion in Liquidated is that there is a disproportionate distribution of wealth in the United States. A country founded on the ideals of freedom and prosperity has become a land where a shrinking number of people are accumulating a greater amount of the wealth, while the majority of the nation suffers as a result of the actions of this small group. Through her extensive research and attention to data and details, Ho has shown a great understanding of the culture she has studied. If the purpose of anthropology is to help us understand different cultures, Ho has done a great job in showing the history, mythology, and habits of Wall Street as a culture. The language of Liquidated can be difficult to comprehend at times (to quote the great Slim Pickens: "you use your tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore" [Blazing Saddles]), but the payoff for your diligence in study is worth the challenge. If you have an interest in understanding how our socioeconomic status as a nation has become so disparate and volatile, then you will enjoy Liquidated.
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