Karen Ho

I totally skimmed this book as any good grad student does, but I would still recommend this book. It is more academic than popular press. Even I glazed over a few times with all the academic-speak, but if you can get past that, it is a great dive into the world of investment banking. No, it's not boring at all. Rather fascinating at how easily we buy into the idea that anyone who goes to Harvard is "the best." And then if they work at Goldman Sachs they are "the best." And thus whatever they do at Goldman Sachs must be "the best" and we don't have to worry about it...unless taxpayers have to bail them out of the mess they created. And truly, the investigation into the cult of meritocracy and "being smart" is really what hooked me. One day I may reread this slowly, but for now, a skim will have to do.… (mehr)

Best best best! explication of subprime crisis and Wall Street culture. The ethnographic approach works. The history in this book was fascinating. It describes, in part, the metamorphosis of the corporation as solid entity to a lava lamp-like liquidity with emphasis on share-holder value. I don't know where lava lamps would fall on the liquidity scale, but 'the Roots and Narratives of Shareholder Value' definitely my favorite chapter.
And this, from 'Downsizers Downsized', " In addition to being more liquid than the rest, Wall Street's larger social--and market--purpose is also the necessary evil of forcing the average worker to become more liquid. Investment banks thus position their own approach to change as THE reference point for corporate America, and investment bankers, the least 'lumpy' of workers, function as the ideal (currency) standard--that is, the most cash like--of employment."

As they say in the movie 'Swingers', "You're money."… (mehr)

This is a great book; my review won’t do it justice. Ho, an anthropologist, worked as an analyst on Wall Street and starts by exploring in depth the ideology of “merit” that firms use, which turns out to involve being as much like a privileged white guy with a Harvard/Penn education as possible. At the same time, much of the 100-hour week is spent on busywork and self-described bullshit and lying in order to justify deals. Convinced that they’re on top because they work so hard and are so smart, bankers also have an ideology that tells them that they enhance the efficiency of the market by furthering shareholder value. Unfortunately, the concept of shareholder value leads them to ignore all the other stakeholders in an economic entity, including most prominently the employees. Paradoxically, the laser focus on shareholder value—for which read stock price—leads to a short-term mentality that routinely destroys long-term value even for shareholders. Ho argues that Wall Streeters’ own experience of employment insecurity—even in good years tons of them are fired and replaced by others with degrees from elite institutions—leads them to accept this volatility as natural and appropriate, regardless of whether you’re a steelworker with limited ability to find a different job. Because there’s no point in building up a long-term orientation within a firm, they care only about this year’s bonus (or maybe at this point it’s vice versa), not about the long-term success of the firm and certainly not about the success of the clients they worked tirelessly to draw into revenue-generating deals. Additional toxicity was contributed by bankers’ conviction that the government would help them if they really screwed up because they were too big to fail. As Ho says, they depended on government to absorb the risk of their focus on immediate profits for themselves. Depressing but important reading.… (mehr)