While a socio-ethnic lens is increasingly the norm in approaching earlier subjects in financial history, it has been largely absent from the historiography of the financialization of the American economy in the late 20th century, where financiers are rendered as either mechanical profit-seekers or spectacular villains in the mode of Gordon Gekko.
This paper seeks to correct this lacuna by examining the overrepresentation of Jews among the most high-profile financiers of 1980s Wall Street. Was the Jewishness of corporate raider Carl Icahn or junk bond kingpin Michael Milken mere coincidence, or did it reflect ethnic segregation in managerial capitalism? And how did Wall Street’s discursive backyard—the New York-centered world of elite media—understand the relationship between ethnicity and financialization?
Drawing on published journalistic sources, this paper answers these questions in two parts. First, it shows how ethnic segregation on 1960s Wall Street pushed Jews into the burgeoning mergers and acquisitions (M&A) field, which offered industrialists new financial sources for profits as domestic markets became saturated and export competitiveness declined. That, in turn, led to a disproportionate number of Jews profiting from the corporate takeover boom of the 1980s, which responded to acute political economic pressures from the state and institutional investors to obtain returns on investment that industrial capital could no longer provide.
But when liberal media commentators wrote about the takeover boom, they tended to emphasize not its roots in the contradictions of postwar industrial capitalism, but rather a false distinction between “bad” (mostly Jewish) financial capitalists on Wall Street and “good” (mostly gentile) industrial capitalists in the heartland. Though not self-consciously bigoted, writers like Michael Thomas and James Stewart invariably leaned on antisemitic tropes to portray financialization and its social costs as alien, rather than integral, to the American capitalist order.