Customer Reviews

What Goes Up: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street as Told by the Bankers, Brokers, CEOs, and Scoundrels Who Made It Happen

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Oral histories can be problematic reads. It's not just that the cleverest sound bite isn't always the best way of explaining something, or that a writer trying to get quotes to smoothly blend together faces the mounting temptation to play around with his interviewee's words. There's often a mosaic-like confusion of voices, which can make reading about a normally difficult subject even harder, like trying to figure out a 40-year-running soap opera from watching a single episode.

Eric J. Weiner's "What Goes Up" traces the history of Wall Street from pre-World War II days to just after 9/11 in mosaic fashion, both by concentrating each chapter on a unique milestone moment and then by spinning out each chapter in the form of quotes, most running several paragraphs, from people who were there.

There are some great quotes, too. "Something I've learned is that every good idea on Wall Street is driven into the ground like a tomato stake," says writer James Grant, in a chapter about the rise of junk bonds. Mutual fund guru Peter Lynch recalls cutting short a rare vacation to Ireland in 1987 when the market suddenly lost a fifth of its value in one day. Jerry Tsai, the Lynch of an earlier day, candidly recalls the heady Go-Go 1960s, while longtime broker Peter Low recalls the guilt of speculating on Vietnam War news.

"It's mean," he says. "If news breaks out that there's a drug epidemic, Wall Street asks 'Who makes the needles?'"

The downside of Weiner's narrative is that it's not especially enlightening, moving as it does so quickly from one soap opera to the next. It doesn't stick with any one of these, like the acquisition of Shearson Loeb Rhoades by American Express or the RJR Nabisco merger later that decade memorialized in "Barbarians At The Gate," long enough to convey much understanding. The connecting narrative is bare, designed not to intrude on the quotes, but as the large cast of characters in each chapter either talk over the same few points or else disagree with one another with Susan Lucci gusto, one misses a central, unifying voice.

I liked Weiner's work with the chapter on "junk-bond king" Michael Milken, especially because that has not only a good selection of quotes but a linear narrative that arrives at a bold conclusion, that being that Milken was essentially laid out for the sins of others. "Milken never did anything wrong," says former Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski. "Nothing."

Milken is quoted as well, but like Sanford Weill, Warren Buffett, and some others, he didn't cooperate with Weiner's book. Rather, Weiner took quotes from other sources and included them in his oral history, properly notated, but still a little awkward. It would have been better had Weiner included those second-hand comments in a beefier narrative framework, and left the long quotes for those who did talk to him, especially since they include some voluble, interesting, and underappreciated figures.

I liked "What Goes Up," but not a lot, and I didn't feel like I learned much of anything I can carry with me. It's a good idea for a book, just not substantive enough for a curious layman like me. That being said, I think a stockbroker or economic history buff will appreciate "What Goes Up" for being a Norton Anthology of famous moments on Wall Street, something to refer to and augment their deeper understanding of what goes up, and on.

In a not-too-typical style of narration, the author explores various viewpoints regarding a wide variety of Wall Street related events. The format is different in the sense, that entire chapters are made of quasi-independent paragraphs which are direct quotes or paraphrases from different people. It gives the book a distinct look, not necessarily a format the average business-related book follows. In that sense, the book takes a little getting used to. However, the book does provide some very interesting insights on some of the events (sort of backstage news) that have roiled Wall Street over its existence. The business-info-buff will most certainly find this book to be useful, though this reviewer didn't find the book very entertaining or well-organized. A good read.

Eric Weiner uses the words of the titans of Wall Street to describe the ups and downs of Wall Street's long march. Chapters are organized around rough themes (the early tycoons, junk bonds, the emergence of conglomerates, etc.) with alternating paragraphs written by the leaders of the great Wall Street firms.

The primary sources provide direct insight to what happened in a very easy to read format. As a survey, the book provides a readers digest version of much of the popular banking literature. (The chapter on leveraged buyouts has just enough detail to allow one to skip Barbarians at the Gate.) Very efficient background material for anyone entering the field.

There are two limitations with the style and direction of the book. By it's nature, the book focuses primarily on New York banking, and misses much of the story of globalization. The other is that by using people's own words, one has to read between the lines to find the real story. Both limitations are unavoidable given the intention and form of the book.

This is the single best book on Wall St. I've ever read. I've read at least 100 of them. This one is succinct, interesting and comprehensive. It covers at least briefly all the major events and players through the modern era of Wall St. It is very engaging, because of the style, which is written from interviews, so the whole book is in the voice of real people. Highly recommended.

There have been other histories of Wall Street before: so what makes What Goes Up: The Uncensored History Of Modern Wall Street As Told By The Bankers, Brokers, CEOs And Scoundrels Who Made It Happen so special from the others? The title says it all: this is not just a third-party analysis of history but a set of insider's observations by those who made Wall Street the center of the financial world. Financial journalist Weiner provides insights based on not just a few, but hundreds of interviews with all levels of Wall Street insider from Warren Buffett to Alan Greenspan: the result is an excellent overview other coverages barely touch.

Wayne of Rebeccasreads recommends WHAT GOES UP as a gossipy history told in interviews with the movers & shakers of the fabled place we call Wall Street.

Little in this world affects Americans as strongly as the inner workings of the financiers who make the decisions that impact our jobs, our retirements & our government policy. Yet most of us know very little about it. WHAT GOES UP aims to help us make sense of what's going on by telling us how we got here from the Great Depression to the Silicon Valley Tech melt-down.

Eric Weiner is a respected, knowledgeable & (a bit too) sympathetic a journalist who has broken his interviews down into digestible chunks, as the financiers tell their stories in their own words, & interspersing them with the history of how big banks & investment houses were forced to part ways after the Great Depression, how the financial world was broken up & the rise of the players who have become today's household names.

Weiner (W) has done an excellent job of demonstrating ,through a series of oral interviews with a number of Wall Street veterans, that the basic goal of Wall Street is speculation and not entrepreneurship.It is unfortunate that the one mention of Adam Smith(see the Pete Petersen interview on pp.253-254)links him to the University of Chicago economics department.Nothing could be further from the truth.Adam Smith was well aware of the difference between enterprise-entreprenuership and speculation.Smith recognized that speculation wastes and destroys the aggregate savings of a nation(see The Wealth of Nations,1776,pp.339-340,Modern Library(Cannan)edition).This has happened repeatedly since Paul Volcker became Federal Reserve Board Chairman in late 1979.
One minor flaw in the book appears to be the attempt to rewrite the history books on Michael Milkin and his junk bond fraud.The evidence is so completely overwhelmingly against Milkin that Jude Wanniski's claim that Milkin was innocent means that Wanniski never figured out the difference between enterprise and speculation in his lifetime.

A good history, plauged by a challenged style. The book itself chronicles the changes on Wall Street from the 1933 timeframe to the bursting of the tech bubble in 2001-2002. The history itself is fascinating, and the eminent cyclicality of Wall Street is evident. The reflections of today are seen in the mirrors of 1973... The content is interesting, and the author does a fine job of identifying and exploring some of the most significant events in Wall Street history - from the evolution of the Main Street broker throuth the CMA, the requirement for automation and technology, Drexel and Boesky, the hedge fund/LTCM crisis and 9/11 and the internet bubble.

However, the style is not my favorite. In essence, the book is a collection of thematic quotes. It isn't a prose dialouge as much as it is a sequence of sometimes disjointed quotes taken from the author's interviews and research on topics and events that shaped Wall Street. While it is great to hear the story from all of the horses' mouths, it isn't a real flowing style and I believe lacks a certain objectivity and entertainment factor that I look for in a book when I read it.

So, this would be a 5 star content, and a 3 star format.

This book is a must read! It's everything you've always wanted to know about Wall Street. The author, Eric J. Weiner, has you captivated. Get it now, before the Holiday rush!!!