As Ho notes, the price for this culture of liquidity is not merely limited to the woeful fate of individual bankers. An overarching value paradigm is imposed by Wall Street on the rest of the economy, as firms (and also, we might add, governments) are compelled to constantly downsize and do more with less. Ho illustrates that, while financiers lionize their austerity agenda in the name of “shareholder value” and the clients whom they ostensibly represent, it has high long-term costs for both individual firms (and their share prices) and society at large (2009, 122–168). Further, the “strategy of no strategy” and the culture of acceleration and short-term profiteering foment the conditions of over-speculation and mis-evaluation that cause market crashes, although Wall Street long ago learned to profit from these economic disasters (2009, 295–324).

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 187