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    September 2021
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Hoffman-LaRoche Nutley, NJ- recently shuttered.




The place where I spent the best years of my life



You can see Paul Krugman from here!

You can see Paul Krugman from here!








And it is broken.

Karen Ho: It’s not about full employment

Anthropologist Karen Ho, author of Liquidated, was on Virtually Speaking a couple of weeks ago.  Check out the whole interview here.

I wrote a series of posts about Liquidated, applying Ho’s observations of Wall Street culture to the pharmaceutical industry because I’m going to make you care about unemployed scientists no matter how much you think you hate them, dammit.  It’s that important.  Here are my posts:

The Strategy of no Strategy Part 1

The Strategy of no Strategy Part 2- Flexibility

The Strategy of no Strategy Part 3- Shareholder Value

The Strategy of no Strategy Part 4- Putting it Together

I have to add that the outrageous price of drugs has just as much to do with the left’s behavior as the right’s but that is for another post. The pharmaceutical industry is probably the only place where that statement is accurate.  I’m not just playing a “professional journalist” who has a fiduciary obligation to my employer to say that “both sides do it”.

Oh, and I also told you that the cost of generics is going to continue to rise.  You heard it here first.

Anyway, back to Karen Ho.  In her interview, she said something very interesting that I had been wondering about.  She said that the “culture of smartness” thinks that no one works harder than they do.  And that’s probably true.  The analysts on Wall Street work crazy hours, like about 100 hours a week.  That doesn’t mean they do anything of value or that is productive.  I’m not sure lining up bullet points within a pixel of their lives is a particularly good use of one’s time, even if the presentations are beautiful.  Content is more important, but that’s just me.  So, essentially, Wall Street takes 22 yr old ivy league graduates, throws them in a financial crash course for a couple of months and turns them loose on the world to work like maniacs.  It love bombs them and tells them they’re wonderful because they pull the levers of the world’s economy without sleep and then those same analysts grow up to leave nasty comments in pharmaceutical industry blogs.

What I’m referring to are the comments that Derek Lowe sometimes gets on his posts when he announces another round of mass layoffs at Merck or Glaxo or whatever.  Some asshole will say something to the effect that it’s ok because it clears out the “deadwood”.

The weird thing is, these layoffs frequently *don’t* clear out the deadwood.  Oh sure, there is some brush clearing but the thing is, if you are in a group run by a blessed manager, you could be the deadest of the wood and still survive.  And a lot of the deadwood is in the managerial class and they tend to have the salesperson’s gift for explaining why they should be retained while everyone under them is cut.  So, by the end of the day, after pharmageddon leaves smoking ruins in its wake, the people who are left are those that haven’t been inside the lab for years.

Anyway, I have to thank Ho for alerting me to who was leaving those comments.  Funny how they would even bother to check up on our horror and dismay at another medicinal chemistry group biting the dust.  But they really have no idea what they’re doing, hence The Strategy of No Strategy.

Chrystia Freeland also has an opinion piece in the NY Times about the role of plutocrats vs populists and social distancing.  Something about Freeland’s piece didn’t seem quite right though.  Freeland is taking it as a given that technology is hollowing out the middle class.  This may be true but I see things from a different perspective and mourn the blight that plutocracy has had on technological progress.

The truth is that we are now experiencing the golden age of biology.  We are learning so much about biological processes on a daily basis that it is hard to keep up.  There is so much we now know and so much yet to be discovered.  There is enough work to keep every chemist and biologist busy for the rest of their lives.

The problem is that no one wants to pay for discovering those mysteries.  There will be diseases that won’t be cured, processes that won’t be applied to other fields and whole new industries that won’t be founded because plutocracy is choking the life out of the discovery field in the name of shareholder value.  And now we have the Republicans and their sequester choking out the only hope we have that government will step in and pick up the slack where shareholder value has failed.

In a way, the demonization of science has helped this process along.  We’re just a bunch of Simon Barsinisters in white lab coats planning to take over the world and heedless of our impact on it.  That suits the lawyers and the politicians that feed on the “knit your own sandals” demographic just fine, doesn’t it Jay Ackroyd?  But it leaves science without any advocates.

The point that Freeland is missing and that Ho might understand better is that there doesn’t need to be a hollowing out of the middle class.  This country could become an unmatchable technology powerhouse once again if some of that money was put back into research at both an industrial and academic level.  But someone has to be willing to commit the money to the process and in the age of shareholder value, that’s not going to happen.  Research takes long term investment and continuity and stability, all three of which are severely lacking these days.  The countries that make the commitment to provide these three elements are going to come out ahead.

One other point I’d like to make has to do with what do we do to get it back on track.  One of the things I hated when I was on the school board was when a bunch of parents complained about the same thing over and over again but never offered any solutions.  Ezra Klein twittered yesterday: what is the country’s most challenging economic problem and what is the solution?  Here’s my answer: the problem is an out of control finance industry.  The solution is to phase out the 401K.  Regulation would also help but the 401K makes more and more of us reliant on risky Wall Street instruments and encourages a kind of recklessness.  A steady stream of 401K payroll deductions is like heroin to addicts.

It’s got to stop.



Sallie Krawcheck will bring Wall Street work culture to the SEC




Never turn your back on the Obama administration or its backers.















Trust no one.


What Yves said







The Strategy of No Strategy: Putting it together

N17 on Wall Street


















In other words, reflection is not Wall Street’s strong suit.












The Strategy of No Strategy: Shareholder Value


This post is about Shareholders vs Stakeholders.  In Wall Street culture, nothing is more important that enhancing “shareholder value”.  But why is it that shareholder value is more important than anything else, including the health of our modern economy and the companies that drive that economy?  Let’s talk about what it’s like to be a corporate stakeholder.

I used to work on a beautiful tree lined campus.  It looked like the science section of a university. Right about now, when it’s Take Your Children to Work month, the trees that were planted by the staff in honor of previous Earth Days would be in full bloom.  Pretty soon, the sidewalks would be edged in fragrant purple lavender.  I have pictures of myself and Brooke under a tree on a Take Your Children to Work Day, the tree abundant with clusters of white flowers and in the background, lots of kids working off energy with hula hoops and jump ropes before another tour of the labs after lunch.  My site also had a gym and after a hard session of spin or pilates in the evening, I would walk back to my office to finish a few things before heading home.  While I strolled back, I thought about how lucky I was to have the job I’d always wanted.  My life at work was like being a perpetual student, learning new things about biology and nature and never having to dress up.

As scientists, we make an unspoken deal with the corporation we work for: it provides the labs and resources we need to make discoveries and we sign those discoveries over to the company for a token amount.  They paid me well.  I have no complaints.  I would have never made the big bucks that I might have if I’d worked on Wall Street, but I was able to pay my bills, put some money aside for my retirement and college funds, and occasionally, I had money to splurge on a Royal Caribbean Cruise or to feed my gadget addiction.  Believe it or not, that was enough for me.  I was just delighted to be there.  No, seriously.

When I tell people that we sign our patents over to our companies for a buck, they can’t believe that we don’t feel cheated.  But you know, discovering drugs is an expensive proposition.  I could never do it by myself, and neither can most scientists, as we are finding out.  But it’s not the money that’s important.  For example, I used to work with the guy who invented Effexor, Morris Husbands.  His invention made the company, Wyeth, billions of dollars, though he never saw more than his own salary and a generous bonus/prize.  It was still a teeny fraction of the profits but that was Ok.  What Morris got that the rest of us envied was letters.  He got letters from patients who thanked him for helping them turn their lives around.  Yes, I know that Effexor isn’t the right drug for everyone but some people genuinely couldn’t pull out of depression without it.  And these patients were so relieved that they went out of their way to track down who this guy was and they wrote to him.  Morris was a lucky man but there’s a cautionary tale about the discovery of Effexor that I’ll get to at the end.

So, what does this have to do with shareholder value?  Bear with me on this because I only took two economics/business courses in college and my knowledge of this is a little rusty.  This was the most difficult part of the book for me to get through because it has to do with the history and philosophy of capitalism.

Here’s the part that I get: In modern capitalism, a corporation consists of many stakeholders.  Shareholders are stakeholders.  But so are managers, employees, vendors, government and the community, among others.  Stakeholders are dependent on the success of the corporation so it is in their interest that the corporation succeeds.  Ho describes a sort of golden age of the corporation post World War II where corporations took their responsibilities to the community and employees seriously.  Maybe it was just a temporal thing that had to do with the proximity to the Great Depression and all that that entailed to the society and economy at large.  This is not to say that corporations always had a rosy relationship with their employees.   But there was an understanding that managers and employees worked together in what was naturally an adversarial relationship to find solutions that would work for everyone.

Then, right around the early sixties, the shareholder contingent got the notion that they were being ripped off.  This was also a time of conglomeration, or what we called mergers and acquisitions before they got to be sexy.  In some cases, the conglomerate was created by the accretion of corporations that were not related to each other.  The conglomerate was sometimes big and unwieldy and not terribly profitable.  In other cases, CEOs were just not eeking out every dollar of profit from the corporation to the satisfaction of the shareholders.  Or they were sharing the profits with employees without a lot of shareholder input.  You know, pensions, health care, union contracts.  Shareholders began to feel like an aggrieved party.  They didn’t feel that lifting all boats on a rising tide was their responsibility.  They wanted a bigger share of the profits.  But how to do it without looking like greedy assholes and how would Wall Street arrange it so it would get a substantial cut?

Enter Adam Smith.  Here’s where Karen Ho describes the neoclassical capitalism as laid out by Smith and how it didn’t evolve to take the modern corporation into consideration and how shareholders took advantage of that lapse.  Ho writes:

The dominant theoretical perspective on the goals and values of corporations has arisen out of the discipline of economics, which in turn has been dominated by the neoclassical tradition (Schrader 1993).

To understand the history and persuasiveness of shareholder value, it is crucial to understand the ideological assumptions which render it natural and legitimate. The most obvious problem with neoclassical economic theory is simply that its core premises are significantly different from, and clash with, any understanding of the firm as a social organization. Neoclassical theories are derived from the “classical” worldviews of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, built upon and reconfigured by the “neoclassicists” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-all before the modern corporation was established as the major organizational form through which business in the United States is conducted. Even contemporary iterations of neoclassical theory bear the marks of their precorporate origins, having never attempted to take into account the corporation as a social institution and refusing to acknowledge how its multiplicity could change the very foundations of economic theory and business norms. David Schrader (1993, 2) has characterized neoclassical theory as “woefully inadequate to the task of providing a sound understanding of the managerial corporation.” Instead, corporations have been continually made to operate according to neoclassical values, however ill the fit.

At the center of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the founding text of classical economics, is the notion that individual acts of economic self-interest combine, through the “invisible hand” of market forces, to further the best interests of society at large. Smith, like many classical economists who followed, centered his theories on the single individual, the notion of an entrepreneur who both owned a small, private enterprise and managed it. The dominant neoclassical assumptions in economics and mainstream business today are certainly grounded in these worldviews, though many pivotal additions and reworkings were necessary. Even after the modern corporation came to be the dominant form of economic organization in the early twentieth century and the “visible hands” of multiple constituents and managers became apparent, neoclassical theories maintained the centrality of the individual entrepreneur.

In fact, throughout the twentieth century, in the face of a completely new socioeconomic phenomenon, entire schools of economists, notably from the University of Chicago, “steadfastly maintained that all important work in economic theory could be carried on from the perspective of an individualistic analysis with an assumption of perfectly competitive markets” (Schrader 1993, 67). The resurgence of shareholder value in the 198os, then, can be read as part of a long line of neoclassically inspired worldviews attempting to collapse and treat the corporation as a single profit-maximizing individual in the market. Championed by Wall Street financial institutions and brought to prominence during the leveraged buyout movement, the shareholder value movement became, arguably, the culmination and most effective demonstration of neoclassical values in the history of American business. Specifically, neoclassical capitalist worldviews recognize the presence of two entities: the individual owner and private property, understood as an exclusive unit. The individual and his private property are the only two inputs into the equation;3 other actors or claimants cannot wedge themselves into this limited space.

Moreover, Adam Smith imagined that the individual owner-entrepreneur would necessarily manage his own enterprise, and as such, he would be solely entitled to all the fruits of his property, the profits. It is precisely because the owner controls the enterprise and gets to “own” the profit that he, driven by self-interest, is compelled to use his industrial property and labor “efficiently” and grow for the strict purpose of accumulating more profit. This pivotal sequence-ownership, control, full access to profits, efficiency-constitutes the neoclassical, logical order of the relationship between individuals and private property. The glue stringing this causal chain together is the concept of self-interest as motive and the invisible hand as automatic market mechanism. For the capitalist world to be aligned properly, capitalist owners must have full access to the profits through complete control over their private property (Berle and Means iggi).

So, shareholders consider themselves the primary owners and stakeholders of the corporation and all other stakeholders get relegated to interloper status.  Nevermind that modern corporations do not operate strictly by neoclassical principles.  The rights of ownership trump any other claims on profits.  And the shareholders found further justification for their views from Smith himself:

Adam Smith himself, who believed that the managerial corporation would inevitably fail because its very structure negated his assumptions about the interests and motivations of owners and managers:

“The directors of [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master’s honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail … in the management of the affairs of such a company. It is upon this account that joint stock companies … have seldom been able to maintain the competition against private adventurers. They have, accordingly, very seldom succeeded without an exclusive privilege; and frequently have not succeeded with one. (A. Smith zooo, 800)”

To fit into this theoretical legacy, large, public companies had to be understood as if they were merely the creations and appendages of individual entrepreneurs.

(Karen Ho. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street Kindle Edition.)

I think we can see the problems with this view and the solutions that shareholders would impose.  For one thing, a corporation with many shareholders whose interest in a company can be reduced to trading those shares for greater value than they bought them is hardly the kind of owner that Adam Smith envisioned when he wrote the quote above.  Smith lived in a pre-industrial culture where owners were more closely associated with their businesses and where the rule of law was still in its infancy.  It made sense in the 18th century for an owner of a company to keep a close eye on his managers.  Those managers were his stewards but without a proprietary stake in the company itself, were not going to go bankrupt if the company failed.  In the 18th century, the owners bore the primary responsibility for the fate of the corporation so they were most likely to also profit by it.  Their hands were more in the pie so they were more justified in calling the shots and taking their share.  In the 20th century,  ownership is distributed among many thousands of individuals.  This should limit their ability to interfere with the way the corporation is run.  But if they feel they’re not getting their cut, they might start exercising control in different ways.

For example, if the manager CEO did not have the proper attitude of responsibility towards the owners and continued distributing the profits to stakeholders instead of shareholders, then the shareholders would instill that sense of obligation by making the CEO an owner.  Mid-century salaries for corporate managers were generous but modest by today’s standards.  Now, with much of the CEOs compensation in stock, the manager now sees the value of the stock as important to his own wealth so he’s motivated to maximize the value of the stock.  Note that I did not say he is motivated to maximize the value of the corporation.  With ownership as the incentive, money becomes the object.  Other shareholders, such as institutional investors, demand more of the profits as well and eventually, more of the corporations resources are used to pay the shareholders at the expense of the other stakeholders.

I don’t think any of this is new to anyone who has been paying attention in the past couple of decades.  But it’s interesting to know what shareholders have been using as a rationale for their rapacious behavior.  Owners are entitled to their private property.  As far as they’re concerned, everything that is produced by the corporation is theirs and does not need to be distributed to anyone else.  If you were employed by the corporation and stupid enough to buy into the idea that it owed you a pension after 30 years of service, that’s your problem.  The shareholders didn’t authorize that pension plan.  The corporate managers did, probably without consulting the shareholders as to whether they were in favor of such a long term commitment.  Not only that but since shareholders are changing all of the time, how is it possible to entail one’s private property to stakeholders who are not actually owners?  You can see how this logic as slowly infiltrated our culture and our politics.  Remember George W. Bush’s “Ownership Society”?  Not just a slogan, it was a philosophy that really didn’t include the vast majority of us.

In big pharma, we have seen an accelerating dismantling of the corporation and shedding of stakeholders.  It first started during the merger and acquisition frenzy of the late 80s and through the 90s.  With every merger and acquisition, the Wall Street firms that set up the deal would profit greatly, as would the CEOs with a lot of outstanding compensation in stock.  With those early mergers, it was the sales force and other executives that were laid off.  They generally didn’t have a problem landing jobs elsewhere.  There were also some therapeutic areas that were shuttered and the staff either reabsorbed elsewhere or laid off.  But since this was a relatively small number of scientists, it wasn’t alarming at first.  But then there were a couple of high profile deals in the 90s where a whole company’s research division was laid off.  A number of pharmaceutical companies  located in the midwest were shuttered after deals and some staff relocated to the east coast.  Sometimes, this was just the personal preference of the CEOs who didn’t want to live in the midwest.  Brand new labs were mothballed and families displaced.  But still, there was no panic.

It wasn’t until the last decade that the strategy of going “weightless” became clear.  Little by little, therapeutic areas were closed and certain scientific fields relocated to China and India.  Chemists, in particular, have been especially hard hit.  And since 2007, the bottom has completely fallen out of the research industry.  Research is very expensive so corporations aren’t doing it anymore.  They are contracting out everything, leaving former stakeholders on our own.  Without the support of the corporate lab, we can’t afford to do research.  Now, we are hobbling along, hoping we get far enough in a project to sell our patents to a corporation that is waiting, like vultures, for a small company to get out from under it’s R&D debts.  (Those of you who are concerned with the provisions of the JOBS bill that have to do with transparency with investors should take note.  I think there is an important connection here where Wall Street acts as a middle man.) Those companies will end up selling the patents for more than a buck but not anywhere near as much to keep their operations stable.  And in the meantime, the corporate owners, incentivized by ability to shed any obligations to share their wealth with stakeholders, continue to dismantle their infrastructure.  Before long, a corporation will consist of a pool of investors who own patents from which they will derive their wealth and have very light operational costs that are associated with the “smartest” scientists and engineers who will direct the outsourcing and CRO contracts.  R&D will become a commodity and the people who engage in it completely exposed to the free market.

There’s a big problem with this scenario.  Well, there are several, actually.  It turns out that the barrier to conducting research in this environment is too much for many scientists.  It’s not that they’re not business people.  There’s nothing we can’t learn if we put our minds to it.  It’s that startup costs are so astronomical and the amount of work to be done on a project indefinite and not easily quantified, that the probability of losing all your money greatly outweighs the likelihood of striking it rich.  So, scientists are getting out – of science.  In this environment, it’s strictly for the young and unencumbered.  Science will do better in Europe than here in America because European governments typically protect their scientific industries better and labor unions are stronger there.  The stakeholders are more thoroughly grounded.  And corporations will look to Asia for their non-proprietary science.  PhD chemists in China and India are cheap and plentiful.  They’ll do the knock offs and the synthetic work.

Effexor: The one that almost got away

But the other thing that is problematic with this scenario is that serendipity is much less likely to occur.  The corporation is only going to get exactly what it contracted for and nothing more.  Which brings me back to Morris and Effexor.  Morris was the junior PhD on the project and legend has it that the senior chemist called the shots.  Morris was synthesizing a bunch of compounds for testing and wanted to make one that the senior chemist discouraged him from making.  The senior chemist thought they had synthesized enough at that point.  But Morris had the lab and the resources and the time so he synthesized it anyway and that was the one that made Wyeth billions of dollars of shareholder value.

Under the new system, Morris would be working for a CRO and he wouldn’t be paid to make any extra compounds.  He wouldn’t be getting letters and people wouldn’t be getting better and no one would be getting rich.

Oh well.

The Strategy of No Strategy Part 2- Flexibility
















So, what does scientific misconduct have to do with flexibility?















The sad state of journalism















They’re out there if only editors would bother to find them.

Friday: The Strategy of No Strategy- Part 1

The Colonial Eating Club at Princeton










Managing Director

(various levels of senior vice presidents)

Vice Presidents













Go get Karen Ho’s book and read it NOW

Last night, I read more of Karen Ho’s book, Liquidated- An Ethnography of Wall Street and it should be required reading for every literate person in America.  I am not exaggerating.  But if you read it late at night, it might just scare the bejeesus out of you so keep your light on when you go to bed.

What scares me the most is how true it rings to my own experiences at work over the past two decades.  Ho writes like an academic.  This is not a beach read.  You will have to reread passages if you’re not familiar with how finance works.  Her descriptions of capitalism and securities over the country’s history are not easy to get through.  But it’s worth the effort because “vampire squid” does not begin to describe the horror that is Wall Street and what it has done to this country. Somewhere in this book Wall Street is referred to as “parasitical and predatory” and I’d say that’s just about right. But it is precisely Ho’s detached, dry academic style that makes the details so disturbing and makes this book more effective than Occupy Wall Street at focussing our attention on the real culprit of our middle class demise.

Several times while reading this I’ve had to stop and ask myself if all this is true or if I’m just being duped by confirmation bias.  But having seen the evidence of what the pressures of Wall Street have done to Big Pharma since the 80’s, Ho’s hypothesis makes too much sense to deny.  All the pieces fit neatly into place.  And now I realize that I missed my true calling in life.  I should have been an anthropologist because I haven’t missed a thing except some of the backstory that only a person of Karen Ho’s socioeconomic privileged background would be able to ferret out.

I’m only half way through the book so I don’t know if Ho has any recommendations but I know what would get Wall Street’s attention, and I think I’ve mentioned this before: sell your 401K.  Yep, get out of the market altogether.  As long as you have investments in that thing, you and the country will never be free.  And to tell you how much Wall Street has a grip on you, that very suggestion probably made you choke on your Starbucks, right?  You’ve been told for decades that it’s the height of irresponsibility to spend your retirement account (who says you have to spend it?).  You’ve been made to feel like a stupid person eating your seed corn if you take that money out.  Or the fact that the taxes you have to pay for early withdrawal are outrageous makes you think twice about it.  Believe me, I know how you feel.  I have all of my retirement savings tied up in two 401K accounts and the thought of taking it out and paying that criminal excise tax makes my blood boil.  You can bet our buddies at the big investment banks were behind that.  They want access to your money and they want to make it as painful as possible for you to take it away from them.  And it’s not even that they want to play with your hard earned dollars at the casino, although that’s true.  It’s that trapping you and your money in the stockmarket means they can fashion this country’s political system any damn way they please.  Your agency will be harnessed to *their* political goals.  The more you give them, the less you will get back.  The whole goal is to atomize the welfare state so that each person is left completely vulnerable and on her own, a single individual plugged into the Wall Street system without any other means of support.  If the market goes down, YOU go down with it.  So, cash in the 401K if you are unemployed and stop making contributions.  Or if you can’t do that, try to get out of stock funds.  One or two people won’t make any difference to them but millions?  Yeah, that ought to make them blink.

If I and my colleagues hadn’t experienced the effects of Wall Street first hand in the most painful way possible, I would think that Ho’s book was an over the top diatribe against Wall Street.  But Ho does something that the left does not expect.  She rescues the word “corporation”.  Half way through the book, you will start to realize what I have been trying to say for a couple of years now.  Corporations that produce things and employ thousands of people are not the enemy here, or at least the people who work for them and the products are not the enemies.  Even corporate management didn’t start off as bastards, even if some of them have not been overly friendly to labor.  You might say that corporate money has too much influence in politics but as you read the book, the reasons behind that become clear.  And if lefties continue to throw themselves against the word “corporation”, they are only going to be wasting their time.  It is too imprecise.  There are industries that work through corporations and then there are the big investment banks on Wall Street and they haven’t always been the same.  Teasing the agents apart at this point in time is going to be tricky but necessary.

Anyway, just read it.  Make sure you have your Teddy Bear to clutch in the middle of the night.

One very interesting fact from Ho’s book: Wall Street investment banks recruit heavily from a handful of prestigious Ivies.  There are two in particular that the bulk of Wall Street analysts and associates come from: Harvard and Princeton.  I’m not surprised about Princeton.  A few years ago, when I was trying to get Brooke into a private school that wouldn’t drive us all crazy, I toured several in the Princeton area and was surprised to see all the cable business channels running on multiple tv screens in the student lounges.  The kid was waitlisted, probably because we asked for financial aid.  But I digress.  The investment banks seem to think that Harvard and Princeton nurture their students in a way that make them perfect for Wall Street.  They’re smart, driven, ambitious, used to the finer things in life and they are looking for the next Harvard after graduation.  A few others get their attention, like MIT and Wharton.

But investment bankers do not like to recruit from Yale.  They don’t trust Yale graduates because they think they are too liberal.

So, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that when Wall Street knew it was going down in 2007, it recruited a presidential candidate from Harvard and passed on the one from Yale.

Oh, and Ho uses the word “schmooze” to describe the front office guys (almost all of them are guys) who use their relationships and connections to get to the top.  Some of them didn’t learn a thing during their investment bank’s finance training classes.  Apparently, you don’t have to know anything about finance to climb the corporate ladder to success.  You just have to know the right people and be really good at golf.