The Common Man, Nothing More Than A Phantom

When companies hire solely for the physical features of certain qualified and chosen people, they are attempting to assist their business. By doing so, companies do not look at the personality,

In the book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho describes the culture of Wall Street. Karen Ho is an American anthropologist, who earned her undergrad and graduate degrees from Stanford University and got her Ph.D. in anthropology from Princeton University. In 1997, during the middle of Ho’s Princeton education, she took a leave of absence to work in lower Manhattan and observe the natural habitat for investment banking. Bankers Trust New York Corporation (also known as BT) hired Ho to be part of the Management Consulting Group. After six months, Ho was fired due to downsizing. Based on Ho’s stint at BT in 1997, fieldwork from 1998 to 1999 and over 100 interviews with investment bankers, Ho depicts an insider’s account of how

Hayes cites the disasters, like the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the Wall Street Crash of 2008, produced by the elite’s cult of smartness in defiance of common sense. In other words, smartness channeled by increasingly narrow

“represented and reinforced by a specific appearance and bodily technique that dominantly signals that impressiveness; not surprisingly, such characteristics as being impeccably and smartly dressed, dashing appearance, mental and physical quickness, aggressiveness, and vigor reference the default upper-class, maleness, whiteness, and heteronormativity of ideal investment bankers” (Ho 167).

In our lecture about “power” we used Max Weber’s definition of power, which is “an ability to bring about an intended outcome even when opposed by others”. In order for one to achieve power they must be knowledgeable and have the essential resources. With our Wall Street employees, one can see they were obviously very knowledgeable especially when it came to manipulation. Power allowed them to govern their own system and abide by their own set of rules in which they created. The amount of power Wall Street had made it seem as if they were a government system apart from the U.S’s government system. Their government allowed them to trick people into making unwise investments they would soon

Americans believed Goldman Sachs, along with other institutions were part of the demise of the U.S. economy. Spreading more awareness about this initiative can help with the need to change the perception of the bank.

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,

“We entirely prevented stockbrokers in London from telegraphing stockbrokers in Glasgow...if women can do that, is there any limit to what we can do except the limit we put upon ourselves?” She not only forces the audience to empathize with her, but she also gives credible examples of the intelligence of

Wall Street is a thriving place with work that occurs nonstop around the clock. The interconnections that are formed on Wall Street

“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” shows us how basic human nature does not change, whether it is firing as a means to resolve disputes, or in the

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

Jordan’s first day on Wall Street was the day his perception of the world changed. On his first day he was invited out to lunch by a successful coworker. At lunch he described the ins and outs of how to survive Wall Street.

The article seems to summarize their distaste for the reality that Wall street executives maintain a constant authoritarian stance on the “economy” as a model, claiming a knowledge that only those within their ranks possess. The article attributes it as “epistemological”, I would agree, and go as far as to make an analogy to the days when the bible was in a foreign language, and the language of “god” could only be given to them by their leaders of the church an authoritarian model that has since been hunted to near extinction by the crusaders of the Enlightenment.

“To Catch a Trader” To Catch a Trader is a Frontline’s video that describes some moments of the internal situation in the Wall Street, stock’s machinations and their consequences. The main topic of the movie is a usage of inner information that helped traders and hedge funders to earn fortunes. The video provided several examples, like a founder of the SAC Capital Stephen Cohen and CEO of the Galleon Group Raj Rajaratnam. Both these men commanded the services of informers and expert networks to get the inner information and turn to account. The usage of the inner information is the main ethical issue of the video.

Bridgewater Associates is the world’s largest and most successful hedge fund organization, but has a very different culture that you will not find at any other corporation. They follow a radical transparency and truth at all cost theory. The founder, Ray Dalio, believes that his unique culture is the reason for Bridgewater’s success. Through closely reviewing the facts, SWOT analysis, and several options that Bridgewater could do, I recommend that they should not change their culture because it has given them success and a competitive advantage.