Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom [Hardcover]

Doug Henwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1997

Spot rates, zero coupons, blue chips, futures, options on futures, indexes, options on indexes. The vocabulary of a financial market can seem arcane, impenetrable even. Yet, despite its opacity, financial news and comment is ubiquitous. Major national newspapers devote pages of newsprint to the financial sector and television news invariably features a visit to the market for the latest prices. Does this prodigious flow of information have significance for anyone except the tiny percentage of people who have significant holdings of stocks or bonds? And if it does, can non-specialists ever hope to understand what the markets are up to? To these questions, this book answers an emphatic yes. Its author Doug Henwood is a scourge of the stock exchange in the pages of his publication "Left Business Observer". The newsletter has received wide acclamation from J.K. Galbraith among others, and occasional less favourable comment. This book dissects the world's greatest financial centre, laying open the intricacies of how, and for whom, the market works. The Wall Street which emerges is not a pretty sight. Hidden from public view, the markets are poorly regulated, badly managed, chronically myopic, and often corrupt. And though, as Henwood reveals, their activity contributes almost nothing to the real economy where goods are made and jobs created, they nevertheless wield enormous power. With over a trillion dollars a day crossing the wires between the world's banks, Wall Street and its sister financial centres don't just influence government, effectively they are the government. Doug Henwood is the author of "The State of the USA Atlas".

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this "down and dirty" diatribe about American finance, journalist and New York radio personality Henwood makes no attempt at a balanced portrayal of Wall Street. He aims to "embarrass official wisdom" and expose the financial world's weaknesses, perhaps too gloatingly. Intemperate phrasing abounds, e.g., "real estate is based on milking wealth from land and tenants." Admittedly, Henwood flails at both the Left and the Right, and he doesn't hide his biases, but he lovingly quotes Keynes and Marx a little too often. Henwood doesn't claim to be offering any practical investment advice; nor does he present any solutions to the problems against which he fulminates. The result is a difficult, divisive, unpleasant, querulous, and uninstructive book that larger business collections might tolerate.?Alexander Wenner, Indiana Univ. Lib., Bloomington
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Doug Henwood's engaging book is a razor-sharp dissection of the world of high finance... Henwood has the natural-born teacher's ability to make the obscure transparent. -- Gary Mongiovi, The Nation

If Karl Marx wrote as well as Doug Henwood, who knows what course history might have taken? -- James Grant, author of The Trouble with Prosperity

Indispensable to anyone who wants to know where our economy is, where it is going, and why. -- Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 372 pages
• Publisher: Verso (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 086091495X
• ISBN-13: 978-0860914952
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,052,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An informed view of Wall Street from a leftist perspective, December 18, 2001

By 

"authorit" (NYC, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Paperback)

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.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An insider's expose of the markets & the market, September 5, 1997

By 

J. Heartfield "James" (London, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Hardcover)

Wall Street is that most rare thing, a critique of capitalism that knows what it is talking about. Doug Henwood has been writing about Wall Street for some time. He produces the Left Business Observer, subtitled 'accumulation and its discontents', which looks like a cross between a bulletin for investors and a revolutionary manifesto. Henwood's insider knowledge of Wall Street means that he can be as radical as he likes, without being shrugged off as inconsequential. Henwood is scathing about the idea that the stock market and its financial off-shoots exist to mobilise resources for production. As he points out, that is not what they have been doing. If anything the mergers and shake-outs are about taking resources out of production where profits are low. Over and over again Henwood emphasies the divergence between making money on the markets and real production. As he points out, growth in the stock exchange can as easily reflect faltering production as a boom. Henwood reports the growth of investor-power in the USA, the increasing clamour for a greater return on their stock. Astutely, he traces its origins to the first stirrings of ethical investment, when small investors first started to make their voices heard at shareholders meeting by demanding disinvestment from apartheid South Africa. But as Henwood notes, what started with the highest of intentions quickly turned into furious demands for bigger dividends, to be paid for by more lay-offs. Henwood's sources are eclectic: the most up-to-date neo-Keynesians jostle Sandor Ferenczi's psychoanalytic theories of money, Karl Marx's Capital and even the lyrics of a song by eighties punk band the Slits. But what keeps Henwood sharp is his basic intuition that it is the whole system that is at fault, not any singular feature of it. Introducing a chapter on the key players, he says that he could go on about Ivan Boesky and other disgraced traders, but that would only make the rest look artificially good. And, by way of a conclusion ('What is (not) to be done'), Henwood explains the weakness of every piecemeal scheme of reforming the markets, from ethical capitalism, to democratising the federal bank. In that spirit he knows, too that the current trend for knocking the financial markets only to praise capitalist industry must be wrong. The reason is that the perverse growth of the financial markets is a symptom of the slow-down of capitalist investment, but not its cause. James Heartfiel

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Truth, August 25, 2003

By 

Drew Hunkins (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Paperback)

First a word about the publishing house: Verso Publishing is probably the finest publishing house in the world. When in a bind simply pick up any one of their titles and one cannot go wrong. It's imperative to read at least a few of their books at least once.

Henwood's Wall Street blows the lid off high finance like few other works. It's the definitive critical analysis (along with some of William Greider's books) of the high circles of wealthy investors.

Throughout Wall Street it rips apart the Federal Reserve Board and exposes its gritty innards. Henwood demonstrates that the Fed is an undemocratic institution that's obsessed with any hints of labor militancy, its biggest fear being wage inflation.

The Monetary School is also dissected by Henwood, being exposed as the fraudulent theory it truly is (or clever ruling class ideology). He points out that the Monetarists' ostensibly blamed the federal government for the Great Depression. Of course this has the fascinating effect of letting capitalism completely off the hook. The concepts of over productivity and income polarization, which were the defining characteristics of the 1920s, are rarely to be found in their school of thought.

Constant pressure by Wall Street for ever higher stock prices is what spurred most of the downsizing during the last decade according to Henwood. He smartly points out that this pressure for quick profit growth can often squelch research and development and investment projects which would benefit society. Because shareholders may very well deem these projects irrelevant to short-term profit growth.

Underlying Wall Street throughout Henwood continually pays homage to Karl Marx and some of his incredibly accurate predictions. He also demolishes old shibboleths such as the well worn canard that higher wages automatically translate into reduced employment opportunities, or that rising stock prices always mean a rosy economic picture for the general population. Wall Street proves that rising stock prices can often coincide with a poor economy for the masses.

Henwood documents the fraudulent work done by professional money managers who'd be better off throwing darts at a dart board than using their investment "skills" when making investment decisions for clients.

Some of the most important and informative sections deal with the rising consumer debt of the average American citizen. Being leveraged to the hilt, the family unit has basically been turned into a player in a giant Ponzi scheme. Capitalism in the United States desperately relies on credit-financed consumption to stay afloat.

Most books dealing with such an overarching topic give a paltry and dissatisfying "What is to be Done" final chapter. This isn't the case for Wall Street. Henwood offers up many concrete and plausible solutions. Finally at one point asserting that an authentic financial transformation must be made along with an attack on capitalist social power in general.