Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho (review)

About a month into the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times asked a barefoot protestor and a stockbroker in a pinstripe suit to share their political views over drinks of cappuccino and Snapple. (Guess who had which? It’s not what you think). Most people working on the Street are not “fat cats,” the broker insisted, “They’re guys like me who work hard every day; every nickel I make, I work hard for.” Readers of Karen Ho’s extraordinary ethnography will recognize this shibboleth for what it is: the mantra of those habituated to an institutional culture in which “overwork is a normative practice” (99), a belief in “money meritocracy” obscures the “hypermobility” of white men (112), and a sense of “personal exemplariness” (41) underwrites staggering indifference to the social suffering caused by their own activities. That the employees of Wall Street’s financial firms are themselves subject to the downsizing they foist upon other American workers only reinforces, Ho tells us, their dedication to “efficiency”—by which they mean “the set of practices which most quickly and cheaply . . . lead directly to increasing stock prices” (163).

Liquidated is a must-read book for anyone interested in how legions of recruits from Ivy League colleges come to espouse and enact the twisted bundle of class interests and market ideology that constitutes neoliberal capitalism. Based on a stint at Bankers Trust in 1997, fieldwork from 1998 to 1999, and interviews with over 100 investment bankers, Ho offers an insider’s account of how Wall Street’s organizational culture fueled that decade’s bull market as well as today’s economic crisis. Central to her analysis is an illuminating dissection of the sacred cow of “shareholder value”—the belief that a manager’s top priority should be to increase stock prices because shareholders “own” the corporation and should therefore “control” it. Ho deftly shows that this “capitalist myth-making” (179) has allowed Wall Street to “gain control of corporations” (188) and subject them to its own agenda, despite the fact that its manic deal making often fails to produce shareholder value (164).

While Ho is adept at spotting the “origin myth” that governs her informants’ worldview, she is less attuned to the narrative of origins that animates her anthropology. Driven to explain why Wall Street inflicts liquidation on corporate America and itself, Ho relies on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” or embodied dispositions, to develop the convoluted claim that “investment banks’ organizational culture produces (and is produced by) their [bankers’] self-understanding as embodiments of the market, as the ultimate ‘liquid’ employee” (252). Ho therefore locates the origin of practices that result in liquidation in a “habitus of downsizing” which is enacted by individuals whose culture compels them to believe that they “are” the market they perform (292). The circularity of this argument leaves little room to imagine how change in the world of investment banking might come about—or how protesters sleeping in parks might ever spur the nation to hold Wall Street accountable for the havoc it has unleashed.