Book Review of 'Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street'

In a speech by Mary Elizabeth Lease, “Wall Street Owns The Country”, she mentioned that this nation is a nation of inconsistencies. The main things she wanted to state was the nation’s economics and political woes because of the government was ruled based on the monetary value by wall street that cause people to suffer. Furthermore, she said that the welfare of the people was no longer considered by the government as a priority but money was. Most of the actions made by the government did not benefit people anymore. The government asked people to go to work and raise a big crop. So the people did as the government said, but the crops were still not enough because the people were “overpopulated”, according to the government. Therefore, people

In 1938, and in the teeth of the longest and fiercest depression that the United States had ever known, capital spending hit an all time high. That’s right! In 1938 the men who owned America began to pour millions of Dollars into new plant and equipment as if there was no tomorrow. We don’t think much about it today, because it has been a long time since the United States has experienced a real bone jolting economic slowdown. The fact is, however, that the very best time for the industrialist to invest in new technologies is in the middle of a depression. This is because it is at such times that labor, raw materials, and new equipment can be purchased at rock bottom prices. Henry Ford may have jumped the gun a bit. He shut down his River

Through written form and literary techniques, the book feed elaborates on many ideas that Anderson puts forth to the responder, one idea that is evident in the book is the idea of morality using it to show that corporations are in fact evil. Morality is the ability of humanity to distinguish between right and wrong, and once we have lost this capability we symbolically lose the core of our humanity. Anderson influenced by his social context where money is power writes “We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.” The repetition of the word “we” and the high modality used in the

“I am not in this world to live up to other people 's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine”, states Fritz Pearls in the “Gestalt Prayer”. As a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Pearls’ quote casts a spot light on social awareness versus self- independence and nonconformity. Similar to the short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853 by Herman Melville. The narrator, is an elderly lawyer with a small time firm who hires a scrivener named Bartleby. In the beginning Bartleby does the work asked of him by the lawyer but as time progresses he stops working completely using the phrase “I would prefer not to” as a form of negligible defiance. As a result of Bartleby’s consistent refusal to complete various tasks and to leave the establishment the lawyer is forced to move his practice elsewhere. The lawyer returns to find that Bartleby was labeled as a vagrant and removed from the office by law enforcement. The lawyer’s strange obsession with Bartleby drives him to visit him in the tombs that have become his prison. As he continued his defiance in the form of refusal of food, he soon dies from starvation.

According to Ho (2009), “The takeover movement culturally commoditized and transformed the very definition and purpose of a public corporation; the corporation became its quickly exchangeable stock in the financial markets, and its primary mission was to increase its stock price.” (p. 129-130). Corporation is much more than an exchangeable stock as it employees billions of people around the world, has a significant input into the world’s economy and produces the goods consumed by billions of people around the world. As it was argued by Michael J. Sandel in in the article of “How Markets Crowd out Morals”, some goods cannot be commoditized without losing its intrinsic value. In this case, corporations became commoditized at the cost of society's

With advanced technology comes the globalization and moving businesses to third world countries from U.S. This movement caused the rate of unemployment to rise and people see themselves in struggle to take care of their families. These issue are the complex of corporations in America. After seeing the movie (The Corporation) based on the book written by Canadian Professor Joel Bakan, we see that corporations are institutions that creates great wealth and profit but in the other hand causes enormous and hidden harm to people. Corporation cannot be imprisoned for criminal activities. Corporations are not humans they are designed by law to be concerned only for their stockholders. This is the issues that we see in our modern society the rich

The word “fraud” was magnified in the business world around the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. No one had seen anything like it. Enron, one of the country’s largest energy companies, went bankrupt and took down with it Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accounting firms in the world. Enron was followed by other accounting scandals such as WorldCom, Tyco, Freddie Mac, and HealthSouth, yet Enron will always be remembered as one of the worst corporate accounting scandals of all time. Enron’s collapse was brought upon by the greed of its corporate hierarchy and how it preyed upon its faithful stockholders and employees who invested so much of their time and money into the company. Enron seemed to portray that the goal of corporate America was to drive up stock prices and get to the peak of the financial mountain by any means necessary. The “Conspiracy of Fools” is a tale of power, crony capitalism, and company greed that lead Enron down the dark road of corporate America.

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind discuss the company Enron’s executives and how success made the executives lose touch with common decencies such as working alongside with women. This piece shows the imbalance with the treatment of sexes in the workplace and how money makes people insensitive to what is around them. The authors want to reach an audience of common people. They use the fall of Enron to warn about what happens when a business is lead with weak morals. McLean and Elkind shift the tone of the passages from exciting stories about the executives, to pointing out how the glitzy lifestyles are a façade to their collapsing business. This strategy makes the reader go from envy to concern about the priorities of the company.

Suicides were abundant as fortunes were lost overnight, companies’ stocks were deemed worthless, and grand companies of manufacture, were split over the course of the day, a stock that was a great investment was now for all its merits worthless. Thousands, millions were lost, not only affecting the rich of the Americas, but the workers, and employees of the then near-default and defunct companies of this

In The Divide, author Matt Taibbi portrays the effects of the Recession on the employees of the large bank firms that committed fraud. Taibbi discusses the life of Linda Almonte, a former executive for JPMorgan Chase. Originally, Linda worked for Washington Mutual, but a large amount of fraudulent activity happened at the bank firm and caused the bank to fail. They were giving loans to “anything that moved” (357) without looking at the consequences. However, the massive amounts of loan were not what “killed the company” (358), it was destroyed because of their inability to rid of their “defective product” (358). After Linda discovered that JPMorgan Chase was committing suspicious acts, she decided to investigate. Not only did she find

When looking at the issue of corporate crime, it becomes apparent that gender is a factor that can play a significant role. Within the article An Ethnography of Wall Street, it is described that because of a social hierarchy, the majority of those in CEO positions are white males while those in lower positions tend to be more females. As discussed in the documentary Inside Job, the males in corporations featured tended to be impulsive risk takers which can be related to the idea of “doing masculinity”. Using these sources, one is able to create a critique of the theory emancipation in accordance to corporate crime. Through the analysis of the documentary Inside Job and the article An Ethnography of Wall Street, it can be determined that corporations are gendered and are based around a sense of masculinity.

Marco Cabral Professor Henry Introduction to Literary Study May 16th, 2018 The Power Struggle “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” by Herman Melville shows through one character, Bartleby, symptoms of depressions, and lack of communicational skills which seems to take control of an office while showing a character, the Lawyer, who is successful, powerful, and safe man on Wall street who seems to start losing his power and control. Throughout the story the Lawyer starts to lose his power and his control over his employees and there is a constant power struggle to maintain that control between him, and his newly hired employee, Bartleby. Melville starts the story by giving the reader an impression of a reliable narrator, The

Another ethnography of Wall Street was carried out by the anthropologist Karen Ho, who, like Gillian Tett, gives us a true perspective about the nature of the financial industry and helps suggest important factors about a liberal democracy in contemporary times. In her book, Ho raises certain issues with regards to the culture of finance. The banks high employee liquidity created a culture of job insecurity, often using practices and assumptions in effort to create and increase shareholder value. However, the attempt to appreciate the value was through the means of the derivative market, which became an obvious indicator that their assumptions would lead to an economic crisis. Capitalism is run by Wall Street personalities who have strong,

How the world communicates is primarily through the media rather than physical face to face communication. This has be known to causes problems with terms of the financial world but for the non-financial world too. Studies have shown that what this world needs is “Anthropological” prism which is an approach to connect the dots better yet have the world more on the same track with communications. Problem is this matter is ignored which tends to have fatal consequences for example the financial crisis in 2008 which is mainly what the article talks about. Anthropologist Gillian Tett has come up with a method called the “Iceberg memo” which leads to the financial system in 2005 and how a small part of financial information was showing which was equalty markets and so fourth. The big chunk which was over seen or hidden was social

There is a sense of complexity today that has led many to believe the individual investor has little chance of competing with professional brokers and investment firms. However, Malkiel states this is a major misconception as he explains in his book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. What does a random walk mean? The random walk means in terms of the stock market that, “short term changes in stock prices cannot be predicted”. So how does a rational investor determine which stocks to purchase to maximize returns? Chapter 1 begins by defining and determining the difference in investing and speculating. Investing defined by Malkiel is the method of “purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably