Wall Street

April 8, 2005 5:10 PM

Wall Street - How it Works, and for Whom, by Doug Henwood. Sold over 20,000 copies as paperback. Acclaimed by Crooked Timber. Available for free under a Creative Commons license (Amazon).
posted by andrew cooke (8 comments total)

note that it's not "politically neutral" - the author is "left wing".
posted by andrew cooke at 5:16 PM on April 8, 2005

There it goes, off my library queue, and into the bookmarks. I can't wait for electronic paper and instant downloads.
posted by Gyan at 5:40 PM on April 8, 2005

On a related note, Henry Hazlitt's astonishing classic Economics in One Lesson is also available online for free.
posted by gd779 at 7:14 PM on April 8, 2005

Wow — great post, and great link, also, gd779. The stock markets bear an unholy fascination for me, and I suppose I'm probably lucky that I can't afford to invest in them as I'm sure I'd lose my shirt.

And another ECM company was run by someone who'd previously been sued by the SEC for various misdeeds; the legal trail was covered by the fact that her bad record was run up when her name was John Huminik, before the intervention of hormones, scalpel, and a legal writ had turned her into Eleanor Schuler.

How can you not love this shit?
posted by IshmaelGraves at 9:42 PM on April 8, 2005

he's "left-wing" but he knows his economics, which makes him refreshing and able to dissect the assumptions that most "orthodox" economists hold as gospel.

His After the New Economy is very good also
posted by stratastar at 11:29 AM on April 9, 2005

Interesting: I'm nearly totally financially illiterate but I've been picking my way through A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which has some rather nasty things to say about those in the stock analyst profession and what their actual motivations and levels of competence are (the bottom line being that in the long term you're better off buying and holding a diverse array of stocks than you are listening to any institutional investor about what the market is going to do). This also sounds intriguing.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 11:45 AM on April 9, 2005

A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which has some rather nasty things to say about those in the stock analyst profession

I haven't read the book in years, but doesn't Malkiel concede that the presence of analysts is the very reason that that the market is so efficient?
posted by Kwantsar at 12:47 PM on April 9, 2005

doesn't Malkiel concede that the presence of analysts is the very reason that that the market is so efficient?

I'm only about halfway through, but the idea there seems to be that this is a beneficial side effect that helps the investor with a broad (indexed?) portfolio rather than those whose investments are being directly managed based on the advice of an analyst. But like I said, it's all pretty new to me so I may not have the whole concept clear.

It's also possible that he may be taking a harder line in the text I'm reading as compared to the one you read. The historic sections are fairly up to date (this edition covers the internet bubble, Enron, and the various conflict of interest cases Spitzer had started against some investment banking firms), so he may have become less conciliatory in the meantime.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 1:34 PM on April 9, 2005