by Gillian Tett
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
1. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
2. Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe (New York: Free Press, 2010).
3. Gillian Tett, “Ambiguous Alliances; Marriage and Identity in a Muslim Village in Soviet Tajikistan” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1996). See also Gillian Tett, “Guardians of the Faith, Gender and Religion in an (Ex) Soviet Tajik Village,” Muslim Women’s Choices; Religious Belief and Social Reality, C. F. El-Solh and J Mabro, eds. (Providence, RI), pp. 128–51.
INTRODUCTION: BLOOMBERG’S SKUNKWORKS
1. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
2. New York Senate files, Jeffrey D. Klein, “A Survey of Bank Owned Properties in New York City,” July 2011.
3. “Bronx House Fire Kills Boy, 12, and His Parents,” New York Times, April 25, 2011.
4. “3 Killed in Monday Morning Bronx Fire,” CBS New York, April 25, 2011.
5. Klein, “A Survey of Bank Owned Properties in New York City.”
6. Barry Paddock, John Lauinger and Corky Siemaszko, “Drug Dealers in First Floor of Illegal Bronx Apt. Building Barred City Inspectors,” New York Daily News, April 27, 2011.
7. “Out of Control, Out of Sight,” Citizens Housing Planning Council Report, May 2, 2011.
8. Klein, “A Survey of Bank Owned Properties in New York City.”
9. Barry Paddock, John Lauinger, and Corky Siemanzko, “No Way Out for Tragic Family,” New York Daily News, April 27, 2011.
10. Fire Department Citywide Statistics, Performance Indicators.
11. City of New York press release, “Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Cassano Announce 2012 Sets All-Time Record for Fewest Fire Fatalities in New York City History,” January 2, 2013.
12. Benjamin Lesser and Brian Kates, “Hidden Deathtraps: After Flushing Fire and 200k Complaints, Divided Apartments Still Run Rampant,” New York Daily News, November 14, 2009.
13. Data from City Hall and Mike Flowers’s presentations.
14. “Top 25 Employers in New York City in 2013,” Crain’s New York Business, March 21, 2014.
15. Paul Davidson, “Compatible Radio Systems Would Cost Billions,” USA Today, December 28, 2005.
16. “Big Data in the Big Apple,” Slate, March 6, 2013.
17. See Bloomberg’s tweets on www.twitter.com; also Commencement Speech by Michael Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University, 2010.
18. Michael M. Grynbaum, “The Reporters of City Hall Return to Their Old Perch,” New York Times, May 24, 2012.
19. Code for America Summit 2012, Mike Flowers, Day 1, October 4, 2012.
20. Thor Olavsrud, “How Big Data Saves Lives in New York City,” CIO, October 25, 2012.
21. To see the Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output file (PLUTO), see http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml.
22. Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, “The Rise of Big Data,” Foreign Affairs, May 1, 2013. See also Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Eamon Dolan: Mariner, 2014).
23. Interview with Mike Flowers, http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/06/predictive-data-analytics-big-data-nyc.html.
24. Alex Howard, “Predictive Data Analytics in Saving Lives and Taxpayer Dollars in New York City,” Radar Online, June 26, 2012; “Mayor Moves Against Drugs,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2011.
25. Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks and What to Do About It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
26. https://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2014/020314.htm.
27. Oxford English Dictionary.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Part 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982) (from 1776 manuscript).
31. See the official report on the BP oil spill: National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, “Deep Water; The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling. Report to the President,” January 2011, http://www.gpo.gov. Also: Peter Elkind and David Whitford with Doris Burke, “BP: An Accident Waiting to Happen,” Fortune, January 24, 2011, and Ed Crooks, “US report spells out BP failures in Gulf,” Financial Times, September 15, 2011.
32. See the damning report by Anton Valukas on the GM scandal: “General Motors Company: Regarding Ignition Switch Recalls,” May 29 2014, by Anton R. Valukas, Jenner & Block LLC, http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1183508/g-m-internal-investigation-report.pdf.
33. See the Mary Barra town hall on June 5, 2014, http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/Jun/060514-ignition-report.html.
34. 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary, “Management” subsection, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-911REPORT/pdf/GPO-911REPORT.pdf.
35. Denis Campbell, “NHS Told to Abandon Delayed IT Project,” The Guardian, September 21, 2011.
36. Stephen Hugh-Jones, “The Symbolic and the Real,” Cambridge University Lectures, Lent term 2005, http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/hugh_jones/abstract.htm.
1: THE NONDANCERS
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
2. Pierre Bourdieu, The Bachelor’s Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bâearn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Translated from Le bal des celibataires (Bourdieu: Edition de Sevil, 2002).
3. Taken from Bourdieu’s essay “La dimension de la domination economique,” Etudes Rurales 113–114 (January–June 1989), pp. 15–36. Reproduced in Bourdieu, The Batchelor’s Ball, pp. v1–v11.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for Self-Analysis (Boston: Polity, 2008), p. 63.
5. Ibid.
6. George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63 (2) (1956), pp. 81–97.
7. Ibid.
8. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
9. Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny, Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity (New York: Random House, 2013).
10. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Donald A. Cress, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999).
11. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (University of California Press, 1969).
12. Caroline M. Eastman and Robin M. Carter, “Anthropological Perspectives on Classification Systems,” 1994. Eastman, C. (1994). 5th ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, 69–78, doi:10.7152/acro.v5i1.13777.
13. Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (New York: Penguin, 2013).
14. Bourdieu, Sketch for Self-Analysis, p. 5.
15. Ibid., p. 97.
16. Ibid., p. 91.
17. Ibid., p. 38.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 40.
20. Robert Layton, An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1.
21. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (1738; U.S.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013).
22. Ernest Gellner, The Concept of Kinship (London: Blackwell, 1973), p. vii.
23. Ibid., pp. vii, viii.
24. Bronislaw Malinowksi, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1984; rpt. of 1922 edition).
25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (Germany: Schocken, 1995; rpt. of 1978 edition).
26. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon, 1971); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Penguin, 2012; rpt.; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago P
ress, 1966).
27. Bourdieu, Sketch for Self-Analysis, p. 40.
28. An excellent description of this period of Bourdieu’s life can be gathered from the photographic account of his work in Algeria, gathered by one of his former students, Craig Calhoun: Pierre Bourdieu and Craig Calhoun, ed., Picturing Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
29. Bourdieu, Sketch for Self-Analysis, p. 48.
30. Ibid., p. 53.
31. Ibid., p. 47.
32. Ibid., p. 61. See also Bourdieu, The Batchelor’s Ball, p. 3.
33. Ibid., p. 67.
34. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 170.
35. Kate Fox, Watching the English (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), p. 6.
36. Ibid., p. 13.
37. Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
38. Caitin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
39. Alexandra Ouroussoff, Wall Street at War: The Secret Struggle for the Global Economy (Boston: Polity, 2010).
40. Douglas Holmes, Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
41. Annelise Riles, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
42. Danah Boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
43. Margaret Mead (1950, p. xxvi) cited in: Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 71.
2: OCTOPUS POTS
1. Lou Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround. (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2002).
2. Sony video by Comdex, http://groupx.com/ourwork/launch/sony.html.
3. Paul Thurott, “Fall Comdex 1999 Reviewed,” http://winsupersite.com/product-review/fall-comdex-1999-reviewed.
4. Martyn Williams, “George Lucas, Playstation 2 Highlight Sony Keynote at Comdex,” CNN, November 16, 1999.
5. http://www.zdnet.com/news/star-wars-creator-gives-sony-thumbs-up/104118; http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/11/17/comdex-1999-sony-aims-high-with-playstation-2.
6. Martyn Williams, “George Lucas, Playstation 2 Highlight Sony Keynote at Comdex,” CNN, November 16 1999.
7. “Sony Global—Sony History,” November 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20061128064313/http://www.sony.net/Fun/SH/1-1/h2.html.
8. “Masaru Ibuka,” PBS Online 1999, ScienCentral, and the American Institute of Physics. “Akio Morita,” PBS Online 1999, ScienCentral, and the American Institute of Physics.
9. “Akio Morita: Gadget Guru,” Entrepreneur, October 10, 2008.
10. Akio Morita, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986), p. 56.
11. Ibid., p. 65.
12. Ibid., pp. 79–81.
13. Meaghan Haire, “A Brief History of the Walkman,” Time, July 1, 2009.
14. Morita, Made in Japan, p. 82.
15. Steve Lohr, “Norio Ohga, Who Led Sony Beyond Electronics, Dies at 81,” New York Times, April 24, 2011.
16. Sea-Jin Chang, Sony vs. Samsung: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants’ Battle for Global Supremacy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008).
17. John Nathan, Sony: Private Life (Boston: Mariner, 2001), p. 315.
18. Sony Corporate Information, Chapter 24: Diversification, www.sony.net.
19. Karl Taro Greenfeld, “Saving Sony: CEO Howard Stringer Plans to Focus on 3-D TV,” Wired. March 22, 2010.
20. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 408.
21. Ibid., p. 362.
22. Sony 2005 Financial Year Fiscal Report, www.sony.net.
23. Andrew Ross Sorkin and Saul Hansel, “Shakeup at Sony Puts Westerner in Leader’s Role,” New York Times, March 7, 2005.
24. Mark Gunther, “The Welshman, the Walkman and the Salarymen,” Fortune, June 1, 2006.
25. For an account of this see: Lou Gerstner, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” Harper Business, 2002; Lisa DiCarlo, “How Lou Gerstner Got IBM to Dance,” Forbes, November 11, 2002; “IBM Corp Turnaround,” Harvard Business School Case Study, March 14, 2000; Lynda Applegate and Elizabeth Collins, “IBM’s Decade of Transformation; Turnaround to Growth,” Harvard Business School Case Study, April 2005.
26. “A Word from Howard: Breaking Down Silos,” Sony United newsletter, January 2, 2006.
27. Martin Fackler, “Sony Plans 10,000 Job Cuts,” New York Times, September 23, 2005.
28. Daisuke Takato, “Sony to Cut 10,000 Jobs, Product Models to End Losses,” Bloomberg News, September 22, 2005.
29. David Macdonald, “Sony Tries to Get Its Mojo Back,” Asia Times, February 7, 2006.
30. Martin Fackler, “Cutting Sony, a Corporate Octopus, Back to a Rational Size,” New York Times, May 29, 2006.
31. Sony corporate announcement, September 2005, www.sony.net.
32. Ibid.
33. Ginny Parker Woods, “Sony’s Picture Is Looking Brighter,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2006.
34. Mark Gunter, “The Welshman, the Walkman and the Salarymen,” Fortune, June 1 2006.
35. Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Harper Business, 2002; see also Lisa diCarlo, “How Louis Gerstner Got IBM to Dance,” Forbes, November 11, 2002.
36. Mark Gunther, “The Welshman, the Walkman and The Salarymen,” Fortune, June 1, 2006.
37. Tim Ferguson, “Samsung v Sony—The Growing ‘2000’ Divide,” Forbes, April 30, 2012.
38. Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael De La Merced, “American Investor Targets Sony for a Breakup,” New York Times, May 14, 2013.
39. Mike Fleming, “George Clooney to Hedge Fund Honcho Daniel Loeb: Stop Spreading Fear at Sony,” Deadline Hollywood, August 2, 2013.
40. For an account of the challenges at Microsoft and the company’s response see: Monica Langley, “Reboot at Microsoft: Impatient Board Sped Ballmer’s Exit,” Wall Street Journal, 2013; “Microsoft Tears Down Walls to Open Up Future,” St Augustine Record, July 13, 2013; Thom Forbes, “Microsoft Blows up Its Silos,” Marketing Daily, July 12, 2013; “Microsoft Transforms But Will It Leave Its Past Behind?” Voice of America, October 25, 2013.
3: WHEN GNOMES GO BLIND
1. Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 109.
2. FINMA (Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority), “Financial Market Crisis and Financial Market Supervision,” September 14, 2009, p. 22. (Hereinafter FINMA report.)
3. Tobias Straumann, “The UBS Crisis in Historical Perspective,” University of Zurich Empirical Research in Economics, September 2010, p. 5.
4. FINMA report, p. 21.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 22.
7. Ibid.
8. Shareholder Report on UBS’s Write-Down, April 18, 2008, p. 6, http://maths-fi.com/ubs-shareholder-report.pdf.
9. Ibid., p. 6.
10. Stephanie Baker-Said and Elena Logutenkova, “The Mess at UBS,” Bloomberg Markets, July 2008.
11. Mark Landler, “UBS Sells Stake After Write-Down,” New York Times, December 10, 2007.
12. Ibid.
13. UBS Shareholder Report, 2008, p. 6; Statement to Shareholders, December 2008.
14. UBS Shareholder Report, 2008, p. 7.
15. Baker-Said and Logutenkova, “The Mess at UBS.”
16. “Switzerland Unveils UBS Bail-out,” BBC World News, October 16, 2008.
17. UBS Shareholder Report, 2008, p. 6.
18. Nick Mathiason, “UBS and US Government Reach Deal over Tax Evasion Dispute,” The Guardian, July 31, 2009.
19. Straumann, “The UBS Crisis in Historical Perspective,” p. 3.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 6.
22. Ibid.
23. John Tagliabue, “2 of the Big 3 Swiss Banks to Join to Seek Global Heft,” New York Times, December 9, 1997.
24. Adrian Cox, “Costas Sees UBS Eclipsing Goldman, Citigroup as Top Fee Earner,” Bloomberg Magazine, March 1, 2004.
25. “Swiss Bank to Acquire Chase Investment Unit,” Associated Press, reprinted in New York Times, February 22, 1991.
26. “Has UBS Found Its Way Out of the Woods?,” BusinessWeek, March 29, 1999.
27. FINMA report, p. 25, footnote.
28. John Tagliabue, “Swiss Banks Calling Wall St. Home,” New York Times, August 31, 2000.
29. Riva D. Atlas, “How Banks Chased a Mirage,” New York Times, May 26, 2002.
30. Michael Corkery, “Health Scare: Calculating UBS’s Loss of Banker Benjamin Lorello,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009.
31. “Top UBS Banker Founds Private Equity Firm,” Financial News, June 29, 2007.
32. “Jefferies Nabs One-time Critic from UBS,” Dow Jones Financial News, June 25, 2009.
33. Cox, “Costas Sees UBS Eclipsing Goldman, Citigroup as Top Fee Earner.”
34. Uta Harnischfeger, “UBS Faults Blinds Ambition for Subprime Miscues,” New York Times, April 22, 2008.
35. The usual definition of securitization is that it is enables bankers to create and issue “tradable securities, such as bonds, that are backed by the income generated by an asset, a loan, a public works project or other revenue source,” to cite the Financial Times lexicon, http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=securitisation, Or as Investopedia says: “Securitization is the process of taking an illiquid asset, or group of assets, and through financial engineering, transforming them into a security. A typical example of securitization is a mortgage-backed security (MBS), which is a type of asset-backed security that is secured by a collection of mortgages.” This occurs in several stages. To quote Investopedia again: “First, a regulated and authorized financial institution originates numerous mortgages, which are secured by claims against the various properties the mortgagors’ purchase. Then, all of the individual mortgages are bundled together into a mortgage pool, which is held in trust as the collateral for an MBS. The MBS can be issued by a third-party financial company, such as a large investment banking firm, or by the same bank that originated the mortgages in the first place. Mortgage-backed securities are also issued by aggregators such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Regardless, the result is the same: a new security is created, backed up by the claims against the mortgagors’ assets. This security can be sold to participants in the secondary mortgage market.” http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/07/securitization.asp.
