The Machinery of Wall Street

The Machinery of Wall Street: WHY IT EXISTS, HOW IT WORKS AND WHAT IT ACCOMPLISHES

To most people The Machinery of Wall Street seems intricate and mysterious. There is probably no part of the business activities of the country that is so much misunderstood.

Introduction:

The popular idea of Wall Street, picked up from miscellaneous sources, such as newspaper headlines, cartoons, magazine stories and moving pictures, seems to embrace a hodge-podge of corpulent, side-whiskered bankers surrounded by champagne bottles, haggard speculators bending feverishly over stock tickers, habitually risking their last dollar and generally losing it, Mephisto-like manipulators always determined to ruin each other or be ruined in the attempt, and childlike young gamblers whose touching confidence in human nature leads them to risk their widowed mothers’ patrimonies in a single throw on any “tip” which may be offered them.

To the man who is earning his livelihood day by day in the Clock-like, well-ordered, efficient business life of the Street, these popular ideas seem so absurd that he thinks they must be mythical. It is only when he leaves his habitual haunts and mingles with the people on the farms, in the stores and in the factories that he awakes with a start to the monumental ignorance of the public in general about the things that seem to him nothing but daily business routine. But while the details of the machinery of Wall Street are complicated, just as are the details of the steel industry or boot and shoe manufacturing or any other specialized department of modern life, its main features and purposes are comparatively simple and very interesting.

Contents:

• Why Do We Need a Wall Street
• The Banks – Bank Statement – Clearing House Sub-Treasury
• The Money and Credit Markets
• Foreign and Domestic Exchange-Balance of Trade
• The Corporation as an Element in Wall Street
• The Bond Market
• How Business Is Done on the Stock Exchange
• Inside the Broker’s Office
• Broker and Customers-The Unlisted Market
• The Curb Market-Private Bankers
• The Promoter-Underwriting Syndicates
• Distribution of News and Quotations
• Theory of Speculation-Speculative Terms

The Machinery of Wall Street By George Charles Selden PDF