Book Review > Fifty Years In Wall Street

This is an abridged version of the original book first published in 1908. Henry Clews migrated to the United States from England in 1850 and became a significant force in Wall Street and influential in politics of the period. The book is now part of the historical record of the activities on Wall Street during the last half of the 1800s, an important period leading to the development of the modern stock exchange.

The second half of the 19th-century was a period of significant economic expansion and prosperity in United States. It was during this time that Wall Street made such a big contribution to the economic development of the country. The stock market of this period was characterised by the activities of small groups of speculators who combined to manipulate stocks and were one of the main causes of market instability and the frequent market panics. The New York Stock Exchange was organised in such a way that it was protected to a large degree from the government pressures, such that efforts of the Legislature “to levy taxes on transactions of the Exchange and to interfere with the business of speculation and investment … have hitherto been happily frustrated.” Lack of legislative control made it easy for operators to “corner” the market in specific stocks and thus exacerbate the problems of market panic.

These were the developmental days of Wall Street stock market, a time of panics and booms with little regulation and there were great opportunities for speculators. The book provides an insight into the activities of many of the outstanding speculators and investors of this period including Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould, whose exploits and manipulations make fascinating reading.

This is not a book that will be of interest to all investors. Those investors who have followed the activities of the opportunists who from time to time attempt to profit illegally in Australia’s regulated markets, will see the similarities in Clews’ characters and the situations of the 1880s. It is this “entrepreneurial” facet of human nature that makes the regulation of markets for securities so necessary but has given us the ordered and usually reliable market place that is now the modern stock exchange.

Bill Dodd is a member of the AIA.