Introduction: Anthropology Goes to Wall Street

My[13] particular strategy in “studying up,” to break through the barriers of security and public relations, was based on institutional kinship.15 To enable this research, I leveraged my socioeconomic background and connections with elite universities–the only sites from which Wall Street investment banks recruit and hire. I was first introduced to investment banking as a career option while an undergraduate at Stanford University, although admittedly Wall Street was not the destination of most of my network of friends (graduate school, nonprofits, and, of course, Silicon Valley were bigger draws). (When I began fieldwork, I also relied on Stanford alumni who worked on Wall Street as contacts and potential informants.) I then became a graduate student at Princeton University, a recruiting hotbed for investment banks. There, I had the opportunity not only to make contacts with alumni but also to participate in the job recruitment process itself. My path to Wall Street was made possible by the institutional, elite “familial” connections between particular universities and Wall Street investment banks, where alumni from prestigious universities have an inside-track into Wall Street. It is thus not far-fetched to argue that elite kinship creates a bridge or network to access finance capital. As Sylvia Yanagisako points out, framing kinship and family as dichotomous with, or external to, the very processes of capitalist formation ignores the centrality of the connections and sentiments of kinship that make capitalist production possible (Yanagisako 2002).
As[21] I have footnoted,[note 16] all of my informants have been given pseudonyms, and although I struggled with whether or not to disguise the financial institutions themselves, I ultimately decided not to. First, the project focuses on Wall Street investment banking culture broadly conceived; as such, I am interested in general ethnographic data, not information on specific banks that might be considered proprietary. Furthermore, precisely because I seek to confront and unpack powerful globalizing institutions that also claim to speak for the markets and corporate America, it makes sense to name these institutions and call attention to their pronouncements, strategies, and influence, as I do with the speeches and announcements by Wall Street ᴄᴇᴏs and senior management made during major events and conferences covered by the press. It is also instructive to note that providing pseudonyms for Wall Street financial institutions is practically a futile exercise given the prevalent cultural norms of the financial market where corporate names statuses, and identities constantly shift[22] over time. For example, in 1997, Dean Witter Discover,[Dean Witter, Discover & Co.] a retail brokerage, merged with prestigious investment bank Morgan Stanley to form Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Discover;[Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Discover Co.] yet, by 2001, to reclaim prestige and name recognition, the firm, which had already dropped the name “Discover,” renamed itself Morgan Stanley.
In[23] parallel, I also encountered Jesse Jackson’s “Wall Street Project,” a division of his Rainbow / ᴘᴜꜱʜ coalition based in New York City, articulating a strategy of incorporating African-Americans and other excluded groups into the stock market. This project, founded in 1997, began as a coalition challenging Wall Street on three fronts: diversity and representation in corporate America and on Wall Street, stock market democratization, and access to capital for “inner cities” and Appalachia.23 In his speech at the Wall Street Project Conference held at the World Trade Center in 1999, Jackson posed the question, “Why are African American continuing to ‘invest’ in the bear lotto when they need to be included as participants in the bull market? Why are our youths buying hundred dollar Nike shoes instead of Nick stock?”24
Perhaps not so ironically, it was precisely at the moment when Jackson advocated the incorporation of marginalized communities into the so-called shareholder value revolution that my Wall Street informants began to suspect the impending burst of the bubble. Many subscribed to the old Wall Street adage: When cab drivers start asking for investment advice and stock picks, its[it’s] time to get out of the market. As Wall Streeters understand it, by the time stock market knowledge seeps to the masses, the bull market has turned into a bubble economy. This assumption only makes sense, of course, if success in the stock market depends on a delicate balance of insider knowledge, market hype, and timing.25 Wall Street, then, views the democratization of stock market participation as a bellwether of oversubscription and as a signal for insiders to sell, meaning “latecomers” to the market tend to bear the brunt of crashes.
Despite Wall Street’s and corporate America’s proclamations about putting shareholders’ interests above all other constituencies of the corporation, the very practices that constitute the shareholder value repertoire do not necessarily enrich owners of corporate stock or empower shareholders to make corporate management decisions. On 25 February 2002, chronicling the continued dot-com stock market bust, Business Week ran a cover story on “The Betrayed Investor,” which documented how the “true believers” in the stock market—the new investor class of the 1990s, comprised of “predominantly middle-class, suburban baby boomers”—had lost “$5 trillion, or 30% of their stock wealth since the spring of 2000” and were now beginning to doubt that the stock market “treats average investors fairly” (Vickers and McNamee 2002, 105).26 The quintessential case[24] in Enron, where shareholder value was proclaimed by Enron senior executives, Wall Street investment banks, and accounting firms such as Arthur Anderson as the central goal, yet their actions mainly benefited themselves. To keep the stock price “artificially” high, top management, who were paid via stock options (and sold their shares before the crash using inside information), worked with investment banks, who received millions in advisory and transaction fees, to find and invent new financial structures and “hypothetical transactions” to both project windfall profits and keep the massive debts off the balance sheet. When Enron imploded, not only did employees lose their jobs and savings, but the investing “public,” that is, the shareholder, lost an estimated $200 billion (McClean and Elkind 2003).