The Go-Go Years – John Brooks, 1973 ★★★½

Capitalism Takes A Trip

At the dawn of the 1970s, terms like “conglomerates” and “hedge funds” fell outside the typical business vernacular. Corporate raiders were a frightening novelty. Could Wall Street have been so innocent not all that long ago?

John Brooks, a financial-news reporter for The New Yorker, had fun explaining how much of the wider cultural craziness of the 1960s wound up trickling into the world of big business, stocks, and bonds. The Go-Go Years details a ten-year span where once-staid brokers began growing out their hair, wearing patterned ties to work, and endangering capitalism at its core by chasing trends and ignoring fundamentals:

Once In Golconda: A True Drama Of Wall Street 1920-1938 – John Brooks, 1969 ★★★½

The Man Who Broke Wall Street

Sometimes history delivers up revolutionaries in deceptive packages. Take Richard Whitney.

Whitney was the pluperfect American aristocrat: boasting all the right connections; demonstrating a correct, gentlemanly bearing; and, as leader of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1930s, exemplifying all his fellow wealthy saw as proper and admirable in life.

But while pushing back against the forces of reform, he wrote checks he couldn’t cash and stole money from friends, thus setting up his financial establishment for a moral crisis that changed how Wall Street worked.