Wall Street: A History

Geisst, a finance professor who has written a shelf of books on American financial institutions, tells the story of the street itself from the 1792 Buttonwood agreement to the present. The organising claim is institutional rather than dramatic: American finance has moved through a repeating cycle in which a new instrument or intermediary creates a boom, the boom produces a scandal, the scandal produces regulation, and the regulation is then worked around by the next innovation. Canal bonds, railroad securities, the trusts, the 1929 crash and Glass-Steagall, the 1980s takeover wave, Enron, and in the updated editions the mortgage crisis all get read through that cycle. Successive editions have extended it — which is itself an argument for the pattern.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s value-investing section pairs technique with history, and this is the long institutional backdrop: two centuries of the same cycle of innovation, excess and rule-making. Reading it alongside Graham and Levy makes the point that the mispricings a value investor lives on are structural features of the market, not aberrations in it.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism — the one section Kyle’s two saved X posts did photograph. The full list came from the source PDF.

Connections

• Wall Street — the subject, as an institution with a two-century record rather than a metaphor.
• Financial History — the boom-scandal-regulation-workaround cycle is the book’s spine.
• Regulation — treated as an output of crises rather than a precaution against them.
• Capitalism — the American version of it, seen through its capital markets.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography.