TVS 030 – Wall Street Culture with Karen Ho Part I

I’m so excited to introduce this episode, one of the most revealing and informative ones that I have done to date! Please welcome a special guest, Karen Ho, an American Anthropologist, who studies wall street culture. Karen is currently teaching at the University of Minnesota, and received her PhD at Princeton and undergraduate and masters at Stanford all in anthropology. This episode is jam packed in that we talk about the three part wall street cocktail, short-termism, greed, etc. etc.  Please enjoy!

* Karen’s background and how she got interested in studying Wall Street Culture

* Making the strange familiar, and making the familiar strange

* Why saying Wall Street Culture is Greedy is too surface level

* How Wall Street Culture Cocktail came to be

* Smartness

* Only recruiting from Harvard and Princeton

* Short-Term-ism

* 2 year analyst programs and burnout from investment banking

* Bonus Structure

* Being paid out on a transaction basis instead of long term value

* Was this culture prevalent in all levels of finance (Analyst to MD)

* Ringing the cash register to many times in the short term

* Is there a solution for this?

* “Draining the swamp”!

* Changing the Wall Street Pay Structure to promote long term value

As always, please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. Email me directly at [email protected] or on the contact form. Also, please subscribe to my facebook page for live updates facebook.com/thevampiresquid. Also follow me on Quora at https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Li-1. To support us check us out at Patreon https://www.patreon.com/thevampiresquid