Reddit Reddit reviews Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

We found 7 Reddit comments about Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
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7 Reddit comments about Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book):

u/Hynjia · 82 pointsr/Anarchism

Oh boy!

About a week and half ago I finished Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, which directly address your question.

No, "efficiency", as defined by capitalists, is definitely not profitable. The goal of Wall Street with corporate buyouts and consolidation is to make a company more liquid. The faster money can change hands the better. Everything on Wall Street is liquid, especially the employees. Wall Streets hires and fires people left and right all the time. Good times, bad times, middle times it's a shit show. And then they act surprised when suddenly they don't have people for some market, or they're understaffed in some way, they scramble, overshoot their target, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

They're focused entirely on quarterly earnings rather than long term growth. They honestly think that if you're always posting higher numbers every quarter it's good for the economy even though the economy runs entirely on labor, which they'll treat like it's "fuck you" money and throw it away. But higher quarterly earnings is the basis of financial efficiency, making sure you're always getting more and more money and the other aspects of running a business are "in their place at the right quantities".

Yet somehow the economy is doing well while people die from all sorts of things and starve and can't pay for necessary goods and services.

Nah, efficiency isn't profitable, nor is it sustainable for them or us.

u/Dota2Ethnography · 30 pointsr/pics

It's even worse. Wall Street boasts about having the "smartest people in the world" but can't, not only, avoid large stock market crashes, they also create and inflate them.

The logic is that since they're so smart they will make the market's invisible hand work, and if the crash is inevitable they're able to make the last buck of the bubble and avoid the crash, inflating it.

They are locked in a system where business as usual is smartness while being outside the norms is seen as stupid and disqualifying, according to Karen Ho. Being 'smart' is legitimacy, and we all need legitimacy in all spheres of today's society.

u/jessy0108 · 8 pointsr/Anthropology

My first year in the Master's program I took a seminar in Culture and Economy. We had a pretty good stack of books we read through out the semester. I highly recommend these.

Stephen Gudeman- The Anthropology of Economy

Wilk and Cligget- Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology 2nd Ed

Marshall Sahlins- Stone Age Economics

Karen Ho- Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

Colloredo-Mansfeld- The Native Leisure CLass: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes

Nancy Munn- The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society

Michael T. Taussig- The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Taussig is a great writer. Wilk and Cligget's book is good for basic foundations Economic Anthropology. Karen Ho's book is also a great institutional ethnography as well. Happy Reading!

u/annoyingbeggar · 6 pointsr/CFB

Just read an interesting book on that and apparently, for the number of hours they work, most entry-level investment banking people are making well below minimum wage. The book was written by an anthropologist (Stanford undergrad, Princeton PhD) who left her PhD to work in an investment bank. She talks about how important degrees are and how there are "Harvard" companies and "Princeton" companies and hierarchies surrounding where you got your degree. Not incredibly written but really interesting.

Link. Review.

u/mattBernius · 5 pointsr/Rochester

God. Goddess. Earth Mother. Whatever... Save us from Wall Street Analysts...

Seriously, these folks don't know their ass from their elbow and make oodles on money in a business where they never have to actually answer to their recommendations and predictions because they change jobs and start analyzing different fields every 12 to 18 months.

These are the same people who, for much of the 1990's kept saying that there was no future in Digital Cameras and that Kodak should pour all of it's development efforts into PhotoCD. (source: http://hbr.org/2010/07/wall-street-is-no-friend-to-radical-innovation/ar/1 and the linked journal article).

There was a terrific ethnography published a few years ago that really gets to all of the underlying issues with the entire Investment Banking and Analyst structure. If you're remotely interested in the topic, it's a great read:
http://www.amazon.com/Liquidated-Ethnography-Street-Franklin-Center/dp/0822345994

u/Mernnnnn · 3 pointsr/politics

This I think would be informative here, and to all the conversations happening on this thread.

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

u/goliath1333 · 3 pointsr/conspiracy

The core issue at stake in a financial crisis is liquidity. To have a functioning economy, money has to move back and forth between parties. Debt is a major source of liquidity, as it allows people to both hold money and spend it at the same time.

The purpose of stimulus spending during a recession is not only to "kick-start" the economy, but also to add a huge influx of cash into the market. After Japan's crash in 1991 they refused to provide a sufficient influx of liquidity into the economy. They have never recovered.

A strong central bank manages not only interest rates, but also liquidity. Have you ever heard of the crash of 1987? Probably not, because the Fed immediately added liquidity and the economy was able to recover.

Clinging to the gold standard extended the length of the Great Depression, because in a Gold Standard economy you can't add liquidity.

My main point is that people need money to do business, and if everybody is hoarding theirs, you need a central bank to start handing it out. Without a central bank, we'd be screwed in situations like these.

If you're curious about financial crises and their impacts:

This Time is Different: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8973.html and
Liquidated: http://www.amazon.com/Liquidated-Ethnography-Street-Franklin-Center/dp/0822345994

are both fantastic and revelatory.