Wall Street

Fraser, historian and author, reviews the complicated love-hate relationship between Americans and the financial markets by using Wall Street as the symbol of money and its power. By identifying four personality types that reappear throughout history, he explores more than 200 years of struggle between wealth and work, democracy and elitism, and greed and salvation. These types include the “pretentious aristocrat,” from the 1792 speculator who was jailed for causing the first crash, to Michael Milken, who was jailed in the 1980s for speculation in junk bonds. Fraser’s “wily confidence-man” category with numerous names tells us that such individuals are ever present in a market society. The “imperial heroes” include Cornelius Vanderbilt and “Jubilee Jim” Fisk—the latter identified as “the Donald Trump of the nineteenth century.” The “immoralist,” the sinner category, includes the Gilded Age’s Jay Gould and the “cascade of financial scandals beginning with Enron.” This is an excellent book that traces the history of Wall Street through those who shaped it, for better or for worse.