Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

摘要

Karen Ho is a member of the Faculty of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Among her research interests are feminist studies and finance, globalism, and capitalism. In Liquidated, she brings concepts and research methods from these areas to a timely and absorbing study of the culture of Wall Street's most iconic investment banks. She studied these institutions between 1996 and 1999, a period of the longest bull market in our economic history. She examines Wall Street's "rise to dominance" and then argues, quite convincingly, how Wall Street was able to effectively impose a model of shareholder value on corporate America that resulted in not only greater instability in financial markets but also significant costs of corporate restructuring, especially in terms of reduced employment for the middle class and negative returns for shareholders.