Wall Street runs for a short eight blocks in lower Manhattan and is headquarters of America’s financial markets. But Wall Street is far more than a location—it has been adopted as a term to describe all U.S. financial institutions and U.S. economic power. It has been portrayed ...read more
In the spring and summer of 1929, the U.S. economy was riding high on the decade-long winning spree called the Roaring Twenties, but the Fed was raising interest rates to slow a booming market and an increasingly vocal minority of economists and bankers were beginning to wonder ...read more
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to take the United States off the gold standard may have helped to ease the worst effects of the Great Depression. But the causes of the Great Depression were numerous, and after the stock market crash of 1929, a number of complex ...read more
The Dodd-Frank Act, officially called the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, is legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010 in response to the financial crisis that became known as the Great Recession. Dodd-Frank put regulations on the ...read more
On September 15, 2008, the venerable Wall Street brokerage firm Lehman Brothers seeks Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, becoming the largest victim of the subprime mortgage crisis that would devastate financial markets and contribute to the biggest economic downturn since the ...read more
On this day in 2008, Bear Stearns, the 85-year-old investment bank, narrowly avoids bankruptcy by its sale to J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. at the shockingly low price of $2 per share. With a stock market capitalization of $20 billion in early 2007, Bear Stearns seemed to be riding ...read more
In the 1880s, women were decades away from earning the right to vote. Few owned property, if they were even permitted to do so. In addition to childcare obligations, many toiled in work that was either underpaid, or not paid at all. Essentially, the gears of progress for women ...read more
Sometimes history is made by presidents, revolutionaries, artists, or groundbreaking scientists. But at least once it was altered by a pension benefits consultant sitting at his desk in Pennsylvania studying the tax code in the late 1970s. Today, Ted Benna is known as the “father ...read more
If Lower Manhattan’s Financial District was the center of American capitalism in the 1920s, then the southeast corner of Wall and Broad Streets was its most important junction. It was dominated by the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Co., a financial leviathan that had come out of ...read more
If any pair of investors had the financial clout and lack of scruples required to engineer the bedlam of Black Friday, it was Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. As president and vice president of the Erie Railroad, the duo had won a reputation as two of Wall Street’s most ruthless financial ...read more
Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of ...read more
On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the ...read more
The Securities and Exchange Commission was established in 1934 to regulate the commerce in stocks, bonds, and other securities. After the October 29, 1929, stock market crash, reflections on its cause prompted calls for reform. Controls on the issuing and trading of securities ...read more
On this day in 1867, the first stock ticker is unveiled in New York City. The advent of the ticker ultimately revolutionized the stock market by making up-to-the-minute prices available to investors around the country. Prior to this development, information from the New York ...read more
On this day in 2005, billionaire mogul Martha Stewart is released from a federal prison near Alderson, West Virginia, after serving five months for lying about her sale of ImClone stock in 2001. After her televised exit from the facility, Stewart flew on a chartered jet from ...read more
On August 24, 1982, Martin Siegel meets high-powered stock broker Ivan Boesky at the Harvard Club in New York City to discuss his mounting financial pressures. Boesky offered Siegel, a mergers-and-acquisitions executive, a job, but Siegel, who was looking for some kind of ...read more
On this day in 1914, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) reopens for bond trading after nearly four months, the longest stoppage in the exchange’s history. The outbreak of World War I in Europe forced the NYSE to shut its doors on July 31, 1914, after large numbers of foreign ...read more
