Financial collapses - whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market - are often explained as the inevitable results 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.

Table of Contents

Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Anthropology Goes to Wall Street; 1. Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers; 2. Wall Street's Orientation: Exploitation, Empowerment, and the Politics of Hard Work; 3. Wall Street Historiographies and the Shareholder Value Revolution; 4. The Neoclassical Roots and Origin Narratives of Shareholder Value; 5. Downsizers Downsized: Job Insecurity and Investment Banking Corporate Culture; 6. Liquid Lives, Compensation Schemes, and the Making of (Unsustainable) Financial Markets; 7. Leveraging Dominance and Crises through the Global Notes; References; Index

Prizes

An ethnography of Wall Street, investment bankers and the cultural logics of finance

Reviews

"Liquidated is an interesting description of many of the practices and orientations that exist in large investment banks, one that confirms what the reader may suspect: that these institutions are forcing-grounds for the sort of hubris and invulnerability that goes with the phrase Masters of the Universe', the incomprehensible money that sales staff receive, and the idea that they are 'doing God's work'. It also, however, indicates the reverse of the strength of the social studies of finance. Liquidated may help explain why those in investment banks think and operate in the ways that they do." - James C. Carrier, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute "We're pretty familiar with the economic rationale for the regime of cost-cutting and downsizing throughout corporate America in recent decades. But Karen Ho's research greatly enriches our understanding of how Wall Street's own peculiar culture of transient relationships and relentless competition has contributed to the shareholder revolution. And, along the way, her interviews and fieldwork offer a very revealing picture of the mind of Wall Street. A fascinating and important book." - Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer " Karen Ho has picked an excellent time to publish her fascinating new study...patient ethnographic analysis has produced a fascinating portrait that will be refreshingly novel to most bankers...Ho peppers her account with revealing eyewitness stories...Most fascinating of all is her account of how Wall Street becomes deluded by its own rhetoric about "market efficiency"...I, for one, would vote that Ho's account becomes mandatory reading on any MBA (or investment banking course); if nothing else, it might be more entertaining than the other texts that bankers swallow so uncritically." - Gillian Tett, Financial Times, 2nd October 2009