01 Wall Street 2003 4/11/07 4:43 PM Page i
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OTHER TITLES FROM THE ECONOMIST BOOKS
The Guide to Economic Indicators The Guide to the European Union The Numbers Guide The Style Guide The Guide to Analysing Companies The Guide to Business Modelling The Guide to Financial Markets The Guide to Management Ideas The Dictionary of Business The Dictionary of Economics The International Dictionary of Finance Business Ethics China’s Stockmarket E-Commerce E-trends Globalisation Successful Innovation Successful Mergers
Essential Director Essential Finance Essential Internet Essential Investor
Pocket Asia Pocket Europe in Figures Pocket World in Figures 01 Wall Street 2003 4/11/07 4:43 PM Page iii
WALL STREET
Richard Roberts 01 Wall Street 2003 4/12/07 5:15 PM Page iv
THE ECONOMIST IN ASSOCIATION WITH PROFILE BOOKS LTD
Published by Profile Books Ltd 3a Exmouth House, Pine Street, London ec1r 0jh
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Ltd 2002, 2003 Text copyright © Richard Roberts 2002, 2003
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
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SGS-COC-2061 01 Wall Street 2003 4/11/07 4:43 PM Page v
Contents
1 What is Wall Street? 1 2 How we got here 17 3 Wall Street scandals 54 4 Markets, markets, markets 85 5 The securities industry 118 6 Banking 131 7 Insurance companies and pension funds 138 8 Mutual funds 150 9 Stock exchanges 162 10 Futures and options exchanges 188 11 Payments system, clearing houses and depositories 200 12 Regulation and regulators 209 13 Global money centre 215 14 Wall Street in crisis 223
Appendix 1: Financial-services industry institutions and organisations 231 Appendix 2: Principal players 241 Appendix 3: Key events 1792–2003 256
Further reading 260 This page intentionally left blank 01 Wall Street 2003 4/11/07 4:43 PM Page vii
To Sarah This page intentionally left blank 01 Wall Street 2003 4/11/07 4:43 PM Page 1
1 What is Wall Street?
ike the dollar bills on which its business is based, Wall Street has two L faces. On one side, it is a place – a street in lower Manhattan. On the other, the term is shorthand for an industry – the US wholesale finan- cial-services industry. Since Wall Street, the place, is the hub of this industry, much of the time the two meanings overlap. But lower Man- hattan is by no means the totality of the US wholesale financial-services industry, and so sometimes the term embraces other locations and insti- tutions. The US financial-services industry has two distinct parts: Main Street financial services and Money-centre financial services. Main Street financial services are retail services, that is, they meet the needs of indi- viduals and small businesses for cheque and savings accounts, loans and mortgages, investment and insurance. Money centre activities com- prise a range of wholesale financial activities, meaning that they serve the requirements of corporations, the government and other public bodies (such as states and municipalities), public agencies and the finan- cial-services industry itself. Wall Street, the place, is the leading US money centre and the fore- most US location for the conduct of wholesale financial services. How- ever, it is not the only money centre in North America: Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Toronto are also significant. But New York is without doubt the leading US money centre for international financial activities, an arena in which its peer group consists of the world’s other leading international financial cen- tres: London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt and Zurich.
The Wall Street money centre Wall Street, like other important money centres, comprises a matrix of wholesale financial sectors, financial markets, financial institutions and financial services industry firms. The principal financial sectors are: