The Wall Street Journal, Guide to Who's Who & What's What on Wall Street - Hardcover

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Wall Street--the short street, that is, that cuts across lower Manhattan--isn't very impressive. It isn't grand like Fifth Avenue or busy like Broadway. The street is too narrow and the buildings too closely packed to create any sense of awe. About the best that can be said of it is that the buildings lining the street provide a nice framework for Trinity Church for pedestrians walking west.

But the other Wall Street--the colleciton of brokerage firms, investment banks, and trading houses that together are the nation's securities industry--is endlessly fascinating. This Wall Street stretches from coast to coast, from Manhattan to San Francisco, and encompasses the giants, firms with household names like Merrill Lynch, as well as the obscure. It includes white-shoe investment banks such as Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter that can put together giant mergers or arrange arcane financings anywhere in the world. It also includes seedy little bucket shops in Fort Lauderdale intent on fleecing retirees of their pension money. And Wall Street isn't confined to money-making companies. It includes the places many of those companies do business--the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, the National Association of Securities Dealers. It also includes government agencies that monitor and regulate the business--the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve.

What we have tried to do in this book is give the reader a sense of the creative energy, the financial power, and the ceaseless change that is Wall Street. Rather than offer a superficial survey of all that is Wall Street, we have chosen instead to present a more complete picture of the largest, most powerful firms, the two major trading institutions, and the two most powerful regulators. Taken together, these firms, institutions, and agencies encompass almost every facet of the nation's securities industry (including plenty of the bad stuff).... We think we have struck the best balance, one that will appeal to the Wall Street professional as much as to the merely curious individual investor or student who wants to know more about this enormously powerful, complex industry.

We think the reader will come away with a better understanding of how Wall Street works by examining the structure, culture, and strategies of the firms chosen. And by focusing on recent events more than on history, we hope to impart a sense of immediacy and to capture what may well be an important turning point in Wall Street's development.... Today an estimated four Americans in ten own stocks in one form or another, twice the number in 1980. The mind-boggling growth of the mutual fund industry--there are more mutual funds available to the individual investor than there are stocks on the New York Stock Exchange--is altering forever the traditional role of the retail brokerage house. The little guy and his money has also forced every firm to rethink its long-term strategy....

But the story of Wall Street isn't confined to the retail investor and the bull market. It's also about the global reach of the American securities industry. That became very apparent a few years ago as the Wall Street Journal editors and reporters discussed what was happening to the securities industry in Europe. Virtually every deal we talked about and every financial strategy we mentioned had behind it an American investment bank. It suddenly dawned on us that all the chatter about the globalization of finance was wrong. It is the Americanization of finance that we have witnessed in this decade.

In our increasingly knowledge-based economy it is often said that a company's assets go down the elevator every night. That is certainly true of Wall Street.... One of our particular goals in preparing this guide to Wall Street was to identify some of the most powerful and creative minds in the securities business....

We hope our efforts to explain and describe the securities industry will meet a reception that allows us to bring out regular revisions of this work to stay abreast of the changes that will continue to shake Wall Street.