Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom
Author: Doug Henwood
List Price: $25.00
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ISBN: 086091495X
Publisher: Verso Books (June, 1997)
Sales Rank: 45,532
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
An exceptional critical guide to the murky world of finance!
Wall Street is a well conceived and much needed critical, and accessible, primer on international finance and economics that is worth buying just for the fascinating charts, graphs, and statistics within. While floating between the roles of journalist, scholar, and critical critic Henwood has a real skill at clearing away the mud surrounding institutions that often leave outsiders dumbfounded to understand "how they work and for whom."Though the title of the book is "Wall Street," its focus is really the much broader world of finance, wealth, and power. Stocks, bonds, options, currency, swaps, The Fed, FX exchanges, S&L and derivative scandals, institutional investors, consumer credit, debtors and creditors, gold, leverage, financial theory, monetarism, Keynes, Marx, the relation between shareholders and managers, stock markets and workers, financial markets and governments, the distribution of wealth, and what is to be done are all incorporated into this thorough, but unintimidating, book.
Understanding how financial institutions work is the preoccupation of much sophisticated economic analysis, and Henwood does an admirable job at laying out the major lay and academic theories, their implications and faults. But what sets this book apart is the attempt to move outside the narrowness of how and, sometimes, why traders trade and buyers sell to the effects their actions, and the institutions in which they take place, have upon others and the power relations which are responsible for their profits and losses.
Henwood combines witticism and lucidity to make for a highly informative book, and a delightful read. It is certain that any reader of "Wall Street" will leave with a multitude of general information, new ideas, and insights about finance, political economy, and the individual's relation with them
Rating: 5 out of 5
An informed view of Wall Street from a leftist perspective
I have worked on Wall Street and I have to say this gives a pretty decent macroeconomic view of Wall Street. He explains stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies, the Federal Reserve, Bretton Woods, the (in)efficiency of markets and many other topics. He then interprets what these things mean from a leftist perspective. The financial world is heavily right wing and accuses the left wing of not understanding how economics work and thus why the right wing is right about economics. This book will demystify acronyms like LIBOR, GDP and CAPM, and explain to you in Wall Street terminology how the rich are robbing the working class in this country (and the world) blind. Henwood's book, like Marx's Capital, is at heart an economic treatise with political ideas sandwiched in between the economic data and analysis. I said at the beginning I have worked on Wall Street and that is the truth - once you see the machine up close, or even become a cog in the machine, you realize how right people like Mr. Henwood really are.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Needs an Editor
Journalist Doug Henwood has produced an interesting book on U.S. financial markets. Written from a left-wing point of view, Henwood contends that these markets do not raise capital for new investments or improve corporate governance. Instead, they mainly offer a venue for manic restructurings of corporations that accomplish little besides shifting wealth to rentiers who already have plenty of wealth. Henwood relies mainly on the research of others. The good news about "Wall Street" is that Henwood is witty and iconoclastic. The bad news is that having these traits doesn't mean that he can put together a good book. His bloated and repetitive text mixes statistics, polemics, anecdotes, overviews of biz school research, and potted discussions of Keynes, Marx and Minsky (and Freud!) in a way that informs and entertains the reader (hence my rating of 4 stars) but never systematically establishes the core thesis about the parasitism of Wall Street. The book is worth reading but mainly for readers with a background in finance or economics who can separate the wheat from the chaff.
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