Karen Ho spent years conducting ethnographic research on Wall Street, including a period of employment at an investment bank, to understand how this industry's culture shapes the broader economy. She examines how banks recruit from elite universities, how they train new employees to adopt particular worldviews, and how these worldviews translate into decisions affecting millions of workers and consumers who never set foot on Wall Street. Ho traces how the ideology of shareholder value, which prioritizes stock price above other measures of corporate performance, became dominant and how it justifies practices like mass layoffs and short-term thinking. She shows how investment bankers' own precarious employment, with frequent layoffs and uncertainty, shapes their willingness to impose similar instability on client companies. The book examines how Wall Street's culture of smartness creates conviction that its practitioners deserve to make decisions for everyone, regardless of consequences for those affected. Ho writes as an anthropologist, bringing the same analytical tools applied to distant cultures to the study of a powerful institution at the heart of American capitalism. The book provides essential context for understanding the 2008 financial crisis and Wall Street's continuing influence on economic life.