"Bully Market" - Publicity Machine Hums for the Woman Who Took Goldman Sachs' Money and Stayed (for 17 years)

 The latest hum of the publicity machine for expose on the Goldman Sachs' culture got revved up at the influential The New Yorker. Nice placement.

The article on “Bully Market” is titled “Fear and Clothing at Goldman Sachs.” The clothes part alludes to the book’s author Jamie Fiore Higgins’ fierce commitment to shop discount, not spend on upscale brandname labels. She must have been extraordinary at what she did in order to get away with that. When I was even in middle management and as a vendor pitching to the Fortune 50 I had to make it my business to invest in a pricey wardrobe and Coach attache cases for the laptop.

As a sign of these times vilifying Wall Street the book reviews champion Higgins’ ability to discern alleged moral corruption. But the tag line on that could be the quip: She took the money and stayed – for 17 years, with one annual bonus totaling a million bucks.

Less sophisticated than The New Yorker article coverage of the book focuses on the supposedly poignant development that hostility within her unit put the kibosh on her breastfeeding. That’s the prevailing meme.

For example, as the New York Post article explains in great detail, when she returned from the Goldman Sachs breastfeeding center (no praise in the articles that the financial firm did have such a center) there was a carton of milk on her desk. The next antic was the appearance of a stuffed cow. Why wasn’t this interpreted as standard resentment that when she was in the center she was not on duty accessible to the unit. Developments happen fast in finance.

Of course, there is the usual vilification of the frat boy behavior pervasive on Wall Street. One example presented is an Excel sheet evaluating the f__ability of new female employees.

Published tomorrow, presales on Amazon are brisk: The ranking is 15,776. Who doesn’t want to jump into a book dishing the dirt on that crowd pulling down the big bucks and developing new business at their getaways in the Hamptons.

But the more substantive issue is if this detailed account of alleged bias against women, greed, and bullying of subordinates will reform the culture – not only of Goldman Sachs but also of all of Wall Street?

That other recent expose of both Wall Street and Big Law “The Caesars Palace Coup,” published in March 2021, had a good run in sales. Only recently did its sales ranking on Amazon plunge to 81,807.

But those institutions and players it zeroes in on as typical of all that is wrong in the world of finance and elite lawyering continue to thrive. Likely the details of the Caesars transaction are too complex to entice filmmakers to put together a documentary. So, the reach of its moral and legal finger-pointing will probably continue to be quite circumscribed. The gallows humor about “Caesars” could be: How do I get hired to work in those financial empires and high Profits Per Equity Partner law firms?

Because of the extreme sensitivity to women’s issues, the odds are against gallows humor related to “Bully Market.” Essentially we are stuck praising Higgins’ supposed courage in turning on the financial firm that paid her so well. If she were a man we could be having plenty of fun spoofing this diatribe about how Wall Street operates.

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