Ho’s central argument is that the institutional culture of Wall Street, based on the uncut neoliberal values of performance, flexibility, individualism, competition and risk management, is then downloaded by finance onto other firms in manufacturing, retail and service (and, indeed, onto governments) over which it has sway (2009, 4–13). Investment bankers are encouraged to see themselves as capitalism personified, and their culture of self-congratulation is supported by reference to the laziness, stagnancy and lack of ambition assumed to be the norm in other sectors of the economy. As a result, bankers feel they are doing society a service by encouraging nonfinancial firms to downsize and work leaner, forcing on the wider economy the dynamism, market-responsiveness and efficiency on which they pride themselves. Here Wall Street’s institutional culture takes on a viral characteristic, infecting and recoding a huge range of social and economic institutions with its own values and practices. I shall, in Chapter 5, have occasion to suggest that, in their capacity to evangelize their fundamental faith in markets at the point of a proverbial sword, financiers imagine themselves as angels of creative destruction.

It is no surprise, then, that financiers are held up as the ideal workers of the new precarious global economy (Preda 2005). They appear not to suffer from precarity, but to leverage it to their maximal advantage. They invest their time and money (or take on debt) in their own human capital and gain an elite education, then leverage their subject positions to form a mutually beneficial temporary relationship (not an occupation) with a financial corporation. This corporation is not seen as a paternal employer, but as a financier writ large – the individual financier and the firm exist in a relationship of mutual exploitation, and the financier embraces this as evidence of his or her own worth (Crosthwaite 2010). As such, he or she is not only willing but eager to actively play the labour market, embracing precariousness to make quick moves between employers, seeking to advance his or her career and make more money. This ambition is matched by a willingness both to live in the moment, making quick deals and forming tenuous bonds (networks), and to privatize the future by taking on all the costs of health, old age and other forms of insurance (see Holmes 2007). For these “workers” (who rarely even see themselves as workers) traditional corporate structures and government strictures are viewed as rigid and “slow” institutional constraints, anathema to a culture of overwork, swiftness, cleverness, ambition and competitive individualism.

In the financier, we find the paragon of leveraged precariousness, the ideal to which all workers, no matter how humble, are instructed to aspire. They lead a form of life that strives towards maximum liquidity: one that has few durable bonds and is highly adaptable to profitable circumstances, able to respond with almost inhuman alacrity to the needs of the market. [...] Many take the “work ethic,” ethos and connections they cultivated in the financial realm into private and public management of non-financial firms and government bureaucracies, imposing their austere expectations on other workplaces and sectors. While it might be tempting to imagine that these immaterial workers transcend the body itself, such an approach would be misleading: not only do the pace and form of work take their toll on the body, but those whose bodies are marked by gender, race or ability find it challenging to persist and succeed in an informal macho corporate culture based in many ways on whom you know and what you do in your precious “down time” [...]