Tag Archives: Wall Street

David Graeber on #OWS

On naked capitalism: My first take on the question came when The Guardian asked me to write an oped on Occupy Wall Street a few days later. At the time I was inspired mainly by what Marisa Holmes, another brilliant organizer of the original occupation, had discovered in her work as a video documentarian, doing… Read More »

On the ethnography of finance

From keith Hart: The anthropology of finance has flourished in the last decade or so. The doyen of this field is Bill Maurer who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, particularly new and experimental financial and currency forms and their legal implications. He is the author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative… Read More »

European governments block Wall Street from selling government bonds?

For the first time in five years, no big US investment bank appears among the top nine sovereign bond bookrunners in Europe, according to Dealogic data compiled for the Guardian. Only Morgan Stanley ranks at number 10. Goldman Sachs doesn’t make the table. Goldman made it to number five last year and in 2006, and number… Read More »

An Ethnography of the Nigerian Financial Sector?

I am just about to finish reading anthropologist Karen Ho‘s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. She carried out seventeen months of fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. Actually, she started out as a rookie analyst working in management consulting in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She had the intention of… Read More »

An Ethnography of Wall Street

Financial Times’ Gillian Tett reviews Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street By Karen Ho Duke Press £16.99, 392 pages When I first started covering finance for the FT, I used to get embarrassed when asked about my academic past. Before I became a journalist, I did a… Read More »