Wall Street

In the seven years since the publication of the first edition of Wall Street, America's financial industry has undergone a series of wrenching events that have dramatically changed the nation's economic landscape. The bull market of the 1990's came to a close, ushering in the end of the dot com boom, a record number of mergers occurred, and accounting scandals in companies like Enron and WorldCom shook the financial industry to its core. In this wide-ranging volume, financial historian Charles Geisst provides the first history of Wall Street, explaining how a small, concentrated pocket of lower Manhattan came to have such enormous influence in national and world affairs. In this updated edition, Geisst sums up the recent turbulence that has threatened America's financial industry. He shows how in 1997 thirty NASDAQ market makers paid a record $1.3 billion fine for price irregularities in stocks. He makes sense of the closing of the bull market, and explains a major change in the accounting rules for mergers that caused monumental losses for companies like AOL Time Warner. And he recounts how in the aftermath of the speculative fever that swept Wall Street in the 1990's, the scandals at Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and Conseco represent a last gasp of mergermania and a fallout from a bubble-like market. Wall Street is at once the story of the street itself, from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant, to the modern billion-dollar computer-driven colossus of today. In a broader sense it is an engaging economic history of the United States, the role Wall Street played in making America the most powerful economy in the world, and the many challenges to that role it has faced in recent years.

Long-time financial ad agency president Alec Benn offers a unique, first hand look at America's investment community, at a time of changes so profound that their impact, implications, and significance are still with us. Based on frank, revealing talks with people who participated in those events, on official oral histories (some now unavailable), and on his own well-informed observations, Benn reveals how The New York Stock Exchange nearly collapsed, and how changes that most affect investors today really came about. He provides rare insights into historical figures, such as Ross Perot and Richard Nixon, and their impact on events, and into others who caused, influenced, and sometimes opposed reforms we are still benefitting from. Informative, entertaining, and impeccably researched, Benn's book provides new information to evaluate the investment world today and to appreciate how dangerous it was at another time, a time that some say appears uncomfortably familiar.

Just in time for the 2000 election comes a fascinating look at how the Democrats became the party of Wall Street and how everyone became investors--and what these two things mean in the long run.

Struggle and Survival on Wall Street provides a comprehensive economic analysis of competition between broker-dealers or securities firms. It uses the industrial organization approach which focuses on the interaction of the industry's structure, conduct, and performance to argue that the driving force of competition is through the development of new financial products. The development of new products forces firms to integrate these new services into their existing organization. Matthews argues that the firms which successfully integrate and adapt to an expanded product line grow in size and importance relative to those which do not. He also suggests that the Securities and Exchange Commission needs to adapt to the growing services offered by securities firms by providing a framework in which organizational change can take place.