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(More customer reviews)This book, rich with wonderful old photos, gives a concise history of the last 100 years of the financial culture that has come to be known as Wall Street. A good blend of text, photos, and charts make this book interesting to the non-financial reader.
The author divided the book into decades and each chapter outlined the changes that occurred over those years.
At the beginning of the last century, Wall Street was known for its lack of financial regulation regarding trades. Scandals and outright swindles abounded. Four years after the Crash of 1929, FDR's administration passed nationwide banking and securities laws to make sure that this kind of disaster did not happen again.
Unfortunately, the real and distasteful inner workings of Wall Street were revealed in the Senate hearings. An SEC commissioner called investment bankers "financial termites". This knowledge scared investors away for the next 20 years.
In the early 50s, investing became popular with middle class investors for the first time in a generation, and mutual funds were developed after being gone for 30 years.
The 60s brought the birth of the modern mergers and acquisitions business in the U.S, and the days of small brokerage firms were coming to an end.
The 70s brought extensive reforms concerning commissions while the 80s were the years of junk bonds, insider trading scandals, and the savings and loan crisis.
The author called the 80s the decade of greed and the 90s the decade of boom. The Internet has brought about a totally new way of trading stocks and has made up-to-the-minute financial news available to everyone.
The changes in the last 100 years on Wall Street have been phenomenal, mirroring the technological changes in our society.
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