Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Paperback)

by Doug Henwood (Author)

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Verso (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0860916707
• ISBN-13: 978-0860916703
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #307,549 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 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

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.

19 of 19 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

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating, November 24, 2002

By	Lance Murdoch (North America) - See all my reviews

Critics of America's financial system (capitalism) have pointed to economic deficiencies such as recessions, depressions, unemployment (and underemployment) and so forth as cracks in the system, and with a lot of these cracks popping up recently I've become more interested in the financial system and what's wrong with it. Doug Henwood's book "Wall Street" is very helpful in that respect. We also see a picture of economic history that for some reason we don't see in the news much: over the past thirty years, hours worked have increased, productivity has increased enormously, wealth for the rich has increased enormously but household debt has exploded as hourly wages (inflation-adjusted) have fallen. This is a very interesting trend which I didn't even know about until I read Henwood's book. I guess I'd heard people mention it in passing, but until he lays out the data, where it came from (BLS, Federal Reserve, NBER etc.), puts it on charts etc. it doesn't really hit you as being real as opposed to rhetoric.

Economic books can be dry reading, thus Henwood's wit helps make the reading more enjoyable. Henwood's sympathies also seem to lay with working class people over the rich who the financial markets usually serve, which makes reading easier as well as I don't have to read every passage critically wondering if he is trying to BS me into believing something that's against my interest to believe. This book got me interested in Henwood's other ventures - his newsletter, magazine, radio show, web site, mailing list etc. and they are all interesting as well. I hope every American reads this so they can understand better how this economic system works - after all, the fact that you spend most of your time in life working in order to get money means that *understanding* how money works is one of the more important things in life, right?