The Wall Street Jungle

Remember that supply and demand do not prevail on the securities exchanges; but Ney can help you beat the manipulators at their own game, and he tells how to sue the characters the SEC does nothing to protect you from, or indeed sue the Stock Exchange itself. Ney insists that market flux has nothing to do with basic economic conditions — true, up to a point.

Author’s Note:

Most of us enter the investment business for the same sanitydestroying reasons a woman becomes a prostitute: it avoids the menace of hard work, is a group activity that requires little in the way of intellect, and is a practical means of making money for those with no special talent for anything else.

With money one achieves status and power of a kind no other means can reach—which in itself would not be unworthy if the methods used to obtain it merited our respect. They don’t. It should not surprise us, therefore, that these methods are less than explicit; or that the interests of the Stock Exchanges are solely in their billion-dollar speculations, without regard to their social obligations or the needs of a legitimate auction market. There is a difference between what is legal and what is legitimate.

Once understood, this distinction illuminates an environment in which larceny hides its nakedness in the toggery of law and order, custom and routine. We find it in the no man’s land of rules and regulations that sanction Stock Exchange members’ manhandling of credit and of stock prices on behalf of their own speculations. Short selling, big block fees, special brokerage incentives, and the specialists’ investment and trading accounts, are only a few of the methods used to keep the members of the financial establishment established, at the expense of the individual investor.

Much that is painful in our society is due to the public’s belief in the cant of the Exchange’s chief organs of opinion. Indeed, hidden behind a fagade of pompous jargon and noble affectations, there is more sheer larceny per square foot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than any place else in the world. It is the legacy of a communal effort that has become a property right, handed down from father to son to grandson. It is sustained by the exclusive allegiance of its high priests to a tradition that wars against reason and that has become so powerful that anyone setting himself against it on behalf of a higher loyalty soon finds he has set himself against a power that is identical to that of government itself.

Clearly, the lunatic economics of this larceny appeal to the criminal. The story is told that after he had been deported to Italy, Lucky Luciano granted an interview in which he described a visit to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When the operations of floor specialists had been explained to him, he said, “A terrible thing happened. I realized I’d joined the wrong mob.”

Contents:

• The Specialist or The Legend of Big Brother
• The Specialist’s Book
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• Specialists’ Investment Accounts or Sodom at the Bottom
• The Short Sale or When His Cup Runneth Over Watcheth Out
• A Telephone Call from Humpty-Dumpty or Mr. X of the SEC
• The Financial Elite or Measuring the Stock Exchange’s Economic Power
• The Paradox of the Federal Reserve System
• America Shall Rise Again or The Role of Stock Exchange Credit and the Morning After
• Gluttony on the Bounty or The Big-Block Myth in Exchange Folklore
• A Case in Point
• He Lived Apathy Ever After or Commissioner Saul’s Analysis of Specialist Activities Subsequent to President Kennedy’s Assassination
• The Era of American Political Impotence or Paradise Lost
• Under the Spreading Apathy or La Dolce Vita in the SEC
• The Merits of Speculation
• The Challenge

The Wall Street Jungle By Richard Ney pdf