”After all, the whole Occupy Wall Street movement wouldn’t exist in this time and place were it not for the handiwork of our financial betters (or bettors, if you prefer). The whole American economy is now reaping the whirlwind after fastidiously ensuring that policy makers, regulators and our representatives in Washington all lavished extra solicitude on the lords of Wall Street for being “smart.” The first thing that anyone in finance will tell you about their choice to enter the sector, is that it’s a way to be surrounded by the smartest people. Not the most famous or honorable, not even the richest; the smartest. Karen Ho, in her marvelous book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009) depicts a recruitment process wherein finance representatives convince Ivy League students that finance is the only intellectually challenging, fast-paced atmosphere suited to their superior minds. Wall Street shares the same basic estimation of its stature that Princeton does: a place where nobody is stupid or slow. Later on in their careers, finance workers use this “smartness” to justify the inherent “rightness” of what Wall Street does. Take a merger that results in cashiering of a hundred or so low-level employees who now can’t feed their families, as well as the gradual selling off of a once functional business enterprise into sub-securitized assets designed principally to hoover up broker fees. This sounds bad all around, right? Wrong! It is, don’t forget, a creation of our smartest people, who are able to discern what the market demands.

ows and the downfall of the smartest guys in the room - bookforum.com / daily review