Fifty Years in Wall Street
Henry Clews · 1908
5.0 · 5 ratings
About the book
Half a century on the Street from a banker who saw it all first-hand: Civil War finance, Black Friday, Drew against Vanderbilt, corners, panics and philanthropists. Clews is gossipy, self-satisfied and irreplaceable — the memoir of Wall Street's entire gilded age.
Try the short course
Part 1 · A dry-goods clerk walks in. The first six slides, free.
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In 1857 a storm came in from the West. The Ohio Life and Trust Company, a giant of its day with an office on Wall Street, failed, and business froze almost overnight. Large firms that had ridden out every earlier gale went down after it.
Clews lists the causes plainly: too many imported goods, railroads built fast on borrowed money, a bad harvest that left the country unable to pay for its imports in produce, and bank credit stretched thin everywhere. In October the New York banks suspended payments.
On the Stock Exchange, prices fell fifty per cent in a few days, and a large share of the brokers were forced into liquidation. The Street called it the Western blizzard. Clews, then a young man still outside the Exchange, watched it clear the ground in front of him.
Inside the course
20 parts- A dry-goods clerk's debut in Wall StreetFree above
- Wall Street as a civilizer: Clews answers the pulpit
- How to make money in Wall Street, by one who did
- Business training, and why gentlemen's sons make bad clerks
Questions
Is Fifty Years in Wall Street free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. Fifty Years in Wall Street is waiting in the app’s library.
