by
Karen Ho
View all notes
The "culture of smartness" is central to understanding Wall Street's financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change. On Wall Street, "smartness" means much more than individual intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of "impressiveness", of elite, pinnacle status and expertise, which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers' worthiness as advisors to corporate America and leaders of the global financial markets. To be considered "smart" on Wall Street is to be implicated in a web of situated practices and ideologies, coproduced through the interactions of multiple institutions, processes, and American culture at large, which confer authority and legitimacy on high finance and contribute to the sector's vast influence. The culture of smartness is not simply a quality of Wall Street, but a currency, a driving force productive of both profit accumulation and global prowess.
The forces that push these college students toward investment banking are obviously multiple: the particular college environment, the strength of alumni and peer networks, the cultural linking of success and smartness with Wall Street, the hierarchical narrowing of career options and what constitutes prestige, to name a few. Perhaps the most self-evident reason for Wall Street's recruiting monopoly is simply that its presence dominates campus life: recruiters visit the university virtually every week, even on weekends; they show up in the greatest numbers at career forums, panel discussions and social events; their advertisements for information sessions, "meet and greets", and free drinks and hors d'oeuvres dominate the campus newspapers daily; their company literature and application forms are easily accessible, either at campus locations or online.
[...] "They understand that interns coming in knowing basically nothing - but if you're smart and personable, it's worth it to them to hire you." [...] most do not even know what "financial services" is. "Most are going into finance because they haven't figured out what else they could do," yet "finance employers are seeking them out, telling them they're qualified for finance" no matter what their training, major, or department - as long as they are from Princeton. [...]
mix of bribery (salaries) and flattery (we only hire the best, we therefore recognise you as among the best) and preying on people who dont know what they're doing and therefore susceptible to corporate cajolery
[...] during the initial meeting between a Wall Street investment bank and a potential client, the managing director (MD) on the deal usually begins the meeting by introducing "the deal team" (the vice presidents, associates, and analysts on the pitch) with the explicit purpose of awing the client with their smartness, and thus, expertise. The presentation (contained in the "pitch book") not only includes the proposal for the deal, the market overview and competitor profiles, and the financial rationale for, and impact of, the deal, but also the relevant biographies and posed pictures of the team members, which painstakingly details their prestigious pedigrees and affiliations as well as profiles their deal experience and industry knowledge in the corporate cllient's area of business. [...] Positioning themselves as smarter, savvier, and more cutting-edge than corporate America by capitalizing on the aura of elite institutions, investment banks construct a mutually reinforcing connection between the market and the Ivy League: because we have "the best of the brightest" working for us, then what we say about the market must be believed and the deals we envision should be executed. [...]
hahhahahhahahaa
this isnt' exactly relevant to the point i want to make in my book (which is that SV is essentially the same, esp when it comes to raising money) but important thing to remember: just cus someone is smart doesn't mean they're acting in your interests. they serve their own masters, hidden in that black box algo
[...] When it came time for my cotrainees to be placed in less prestigious and (much) less well-paid divisions of the bank, the full weight of unequal branding and classification bore down on them. It was also during this time that my GMFTP friends began to go home early, recognizing the fact that no matter how long past 6 p.m. they stayed at work or how much initiative they showed, they were excluded from the front-office positions: for them, hard work was already severed from advancement and reward. [...]
like the contractor system
Almost everyone else in the bank is considered "back-office" support staff (which includes operations, account services, trade reconciliation, technical support, word processing) and treated as a "cost center", which is understood as a division that depletes money because of the refusal of investment banks to recognize or compute their contributions as part of revenue generation. [...] They are often from middle- and working-class backgrounds, with an overrepresentation of people of color and women, and tend to receive their jobs through employment agencies, vocational and technical training networks, job postings, and word of mouth. Oftentimes, back-office workers are found not in the bank's "headquarters" building at all, but rather in less expensive locations in Brooklyn, other parts of Manhattan, or across the river in Jersey City. [...]
again, contractors
Many investment bankers I interviewed remarked, occasionally with envy but usually with an edge of moral superiority, how inefficient corporate America is because people move so "slowly." As Wong suggested, it is extremely common for investment bankers to interpret their own experience of overwork as a sign that they know how to "get things done," as proof of their "smartness," in contradistinction to the masses of complacent, less capable workers out in "the real world" who therefore need to be restructured to more efficient use. [...] "We've made everyone smarter. We know much more about how global competition works, about how to create efficiency. Before, in the 1970s, corporations were so sloppy; now they are advanced. We're the grease that makes things turn more efficiently; we understood shareholder value and strategy before anyone else."
inspo for Neil not understanding that most workers already know that their hard work is severed from possibility of reward/advancement and maybe even ultimately useless (selling crap people dont need). they just don't care enough to bother
Wall Street argues that its greed for money is a "counteracting" interest against other more evil passions such as racism and sexism. Because investment banks are so greedy, so singularly focused on money, they become money meritocracies: whoever makes them money will be rewarded regardless of background or identity. Of course, instead of understanding desire for money as itself a constructed "passion," most Wall Streeters see it as a naturalized state. Similarly, the Wall Street mantra that "money does not discriminate" resonates powerfully with the assumption of neoliberal economic theory that racism and other prejudices form "an impediment to efficient market transactions and [are] therefore likely to be overriden in the long run by the exigency to generate profit" [...]
Using money meritocracy as a dominant discourse of exceptionalism, investment banks differentiate themselves from corporate America, which they imagine to be caught up in the traditional "ol' boys' network." Unlike the bureaucratic, out-of-touch managers of most corporations, Wall Street bankers are a modern, renegade breed whose singular focus on money makes possible color-blind innocence and objectivity. [...] investment bankers did not have to be aristocrats, but could be "geeky quant-jocks" or amazing "chess players off the street". [...]
it's funny cus SV views WS as exactly this ol' boys' network
[...] In the immediate postwar period, then, the corporation was dominantly understood as a social institution, an organization with constituents and responsibilities well beyond the individuals and institutions that owned stock in the corporation. The primary concern of the corporation was the maintenance of the integrity of the organization over and beyond what was dubbed as the "derivative" claims of the shareholder - which might have to be sacrificed for the good of the corporation itself.
[...] the poor stewardship and excesses of managers and how it was Wall Street investment bankers who realigned managers to their true purpose of increasing shareholder value. If a CEO did not do what was good for the stock price, then he or she was being self-serving and the only way to guard against management self-interest was to tie compensation (via stock options) to the stock market. In this worldview, corporations exist for the sole benefit of shareholders, and any attempt to separate shareholder interests from those of the corporation was selfish and nonsensical. Although in the modern history of capitalism in the United States, the desire for profit accumulation is not new, what is clearly unique about Wall Street's shareholder value perspective is that employment is thought to be outside the concern of public corporations. Job loss was certainly a sad event, but beyond the responsibility of corporate America. [...]