Coffee Under The Buttonwood Tree: Wall Street 218 Years Later

Against the backdrop of attention grabbing headlines such as “Origin of Wall Street’s Plunge Continues to Elude Officials,” and catchy phrases such as “harrowing plunge,” and “near panic on Wall Street,” in which federal agencies were desperately searching for clues “amid a tangle of electronic trading records from the nation’s increasingly high-tech exchanges,” it became clear that little has changed on Wall Street since the “simpler” days of meeting under the Buttonwood Tree and the animated trading environment of the Tontine Coffee House. With its promise of great wealth and its equally devastating disappointments, a phrase that was used in describing Robert Sobel’s expose “The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market,” Wall Street has always been a world of contrasting realities and conflicting moralities. So while computers have made Wall Street a high speed interconnecting network of opportunity won and lost, (more often the latter for most of us), what remains are the timeless and nefarious antics of the purported “insiders” who find a way to make all the money no matter what the economy. On the other side of this financial balance are the ill-informed working men and women whose ersatz trading practices reduce them from riding the bull one day to wrestling with the bear the next without really understanding the dynamics of how they arrived at a particular point. Don’t think that this is the case? Simply read the corresponding articles to the May 7th headline in which one makes the proclamation that “Traders Made a Fortune as Stock Market Dipped,”, while another bemoaned the fact that “We push our graduates out into the world with little or no financial education.” Joining me to talk about Wall Street and Main Street is expert author John K. Romano.