An Anthropologist on What's Wrong with Wall Street

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1912085,00.html?xid=rss-biztech-yahoo
Excerpt:
What would you want to see change?
I would hope that folks in the Obama Administration would somehow link bonuses to long-term corporate productivity or long-term shareholder value — long-term meaning four to five years instead of five months or a year — and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act [that separated investment and commercial banking]. These are big reforms, but they'd give you a more stable landscape to make even more changes. Part of what I learned is that the very kinds of daily practices that created the boom in the first place — wanting to book as many deals as possible for short-term bonuses, a workplace structured so that they're knowingly not there for very long — paved the way for the bust. I talked to bankers who said, "When we do deals like this, we're probably at the top of the market." They knew. It's not simply that busts always follow booms.