An Anthropologist Explains How Wall Street Culture Reshaped The Entire Economy

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

Hello, Odd Lots listeners, it's Joe Weisenthal. Now, before we get to today's show, I wanted to tell you about another one of our great podcasts here at Bloomberg, Bloomberg Surveillance. So every day of the week, Tom Keen, Jonathan Farrow and Paul Sweeney deliver insight on market news of the day with leaders in global finance, politics and economics.

In a recent episode, they spoke with a brand strategy expert on WeWorks Wild Ride, a global leader in foreign affairs on Trump's Middle East policy, and a top fixed income strategist on Europe's low interest rates.

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Tracy Alloway (1:17)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (1:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (1:24)

Joe, did you get retweeted by Anne Coulter today?

Joe Weisenthal (1:27)

What?

Tracy Alloway (1:30)

But you weren't expecting that.

Joe Weisenthal (1:31)

What made you bring that up? Why would you start an episode with that fact? But yes, I did.

Tracy Alloway (1:36)

I was trying to think of an intro. So I'm just gonna say, let's just say, in an effort to-

Joe Weisenthal (1:43)

Wait, how did you even notice that? Wait, wait, wait a second, wait, wait a second, wait.

How did you even notice that?

Tracy Alloway (1:49)

I'm not gonna tell you. Someone sent it to me.

So in an effort to even out the political scales of your Twitter feed at the moment, today we're gonna be talking about something that actually relates to Elizabeth Warren's campaign platform.

Joe Weisenthal (2:06)

Okay, go on.

Tracy Alloway (2:08)

Okay, you sound really excited.

Joe Weisenthal (2:12)

No, no, I'm excited, also intrigued at this elaborate intro that you're concocting here, but go on.

Tracy Alloway (2:20)

I'm trying to thread a bunch of different stuff together. Okay, but I think it's fair to say that in the upcoming 2020 presidential election, there is this undercurrent of anger at the existing system of capitalism. People are upset about inequality. They think that lots of money just accrues to the 1%.

And so there are all these political proposals on the table, including Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, to try to fix this problem. And the interesting thing that's happened recently is that we've even seen some company executives, including Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, also make some noises about this.

Joe Weisenthal (3:04)

Right. I mean, there's a lot of things going on. So absolutely the sort of lingering anger from the financial sector that we've seen over the last 10 years, it really does not seem like it's faded very much. If anything, maybe it spreads to other sectors like tech, but there still is, no one has really gotten over the crisis from a political perspective. And you do see, as you point out, more and more CEOs in some sense trying to pay lip service to this, saying things like, oh, we're gonna do more than just focus on shareholder returns.

Usually it just seems like that rhetoric, but obviously they sort of see which way the winds are blowing.

Tracy Alloway (3:43)

Right, so we can never be that sure about how serious these CEOs and executives are about changing this shareholder first paradigm, but they're definitely making noises about it. And in fact, Jamie Dimon and all these other companies wrote this big statement talking about the idea of sort of embracing a new idea of value, one that wasn't focused on short-term earnings targets and shareholder returns, but one that presumably also cares about employees and society and the overall national economy and things like that. So that is... Go on.

Joe Weisenthal (4:22)

No, no, I mean, I think you're totally right. And one thing that I do believe is genuine, whether they're going to change their long- or short-term focus or focus on constituencies beyond the short-term, is that I think people are really waking up to the degree to which culture matters inside a corporation and to which a corporation's culture can have its own inertia and be extraordinarily hard to change. I think Wells Fargo and the scandals that they've suffered in recent years is a really good example of that, where there's just all these scandals that are essentially about at its root, basically about short-term operations and hitting these arbitrary targets, being extraordinarily difficult to tamp down and to just get a handle on how far they've spread internally.