Wall Street is the financial district of New York City and home to the largest stock exchange in the world, the New York Stock Exchange, as well as other major stock exchanges such as NASDAQ, New York Board of Commerce and New York Mercantile Exchange. This and others make New York one of the main financial centers in the world. Karen Ho's ethnography seeks to explore the culture of Wall Street and in particular the role of its financial institutions in American multinationals. Companies and investors on Wall Street have had their ups and downs when it comes to business over the years. Many were faced with difficult decisions to make when business was not going well and losses were inevitable. In 1987, when the stock market crashed and in the brief recession that followed, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, banks and brokerage firms had to move off Wall Street to more convenient locations. The recession has left many empty buildings on Wall Street. A few years later, Manhattan city officials offered incentives to convert these commercial buildings into residential use. To survive on Wall Street as a business/employer or employee, it goes without saying that you need to be tenacious, highly intelligent, and capable of making quick decisions. When things slow down and profits begin to decline, the way of doing business must also change. The stock market crash has pushed many companies to seek means of survival, including cutting costs; this occurred in terms of seeking cheaper office space and reducing the number of employees. Wall Street is marked by insecurities for both businesses and individuals and also requires hard work to survive. Most people are paid via commission, which means the better you perform, the higher the compensation. Accord…middle of paper…is more than anyone else and gets hit harder every time a downsizing or restructuring occurs. Karen concludes that Wall Street has little to no respect for back-office workers and that their work ethic, intelligence, innovation and drive are constantly questioned. (Ho, 2009, pp. 16-17). Individualism is seen every day in the way people relate to others regarding the workplace, everyone will only look for their own advantages and will not be involved in helping a colleague keep their job. It's every man for himself as everyone fights for a paycheck or commission. Some investment bankers are even said to engage in illegal activities to stay in business. It's survival for the fittest on Wall Street, investment bankers must do everything to Works Cited Karen Ho: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, 2009 Duke University Press