Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

(Duke University Press) Although financial collapses are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles, Karen Ho rejects the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets — particularly booms and busts — are constructed. Investigating the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, she argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Ho is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She has worked as a business analyst at Bankers Trust, now part of Deutsche Bank.