Eyewitness to Wall Street: 400 Years
of Dreamers, Schemers, Busts and
Booms by David Colbert
See The Brilliance Of Wall Street's Greats
In the tradition of his acclaimed books Eyewitness to America and
Eyewitness to the American West, David Colbert draws on diaries, private
letters, memoirs, and reportage to bring the 400 year history of the world’s
most famous street to life in the words of the people whose lives were
deeply entwined in Wall Street’s performance. Eyewitness to Wall Street
illuminates how the getting and spending of Wall Street is inextricably
linked with America’s national character.
From our first IPO–the European fund-raising that launched America’s
colonization–through today’s mass obsession with the Dow and Nasdaq,
Eyewitness to Wall Street brims with accounts from people who saw it
happen–poets and speculators, patriots and criminals, politicians and

reporters–including Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Andrew Carnegie, Muriel Siebert, Warren Buffet, Connie Bruck,
Christopher Buckley and Michael Lewis. Their accounts reveal the myriad
ways that Wall Street has served not only as the epicenter of American
finance but as a major factor in the larger events of American history, from
the way Wall Street traders saved the Continental Army from bankruptcy
and helped finance the Union during the Civil War to how Americans were
suckered by the bull market of early 1929, and struggled through the
rebuilding of modern Wall Street.
More than half of the book is devoted to the contemporary era, defined by
the “greed is good” 1980s, the bull market 1990s, and the Internet
millionaires and inflated markets of the twenty-first centurys beginning. But
whether it’s a description of how Wall Street took its name from a wall of
logs in New Amsterdam or a look at our present-day market mania, the
eyewitnesses collected here share a knack for revealing the human side of
business.
Through the firsthand reports of those who experienced the manias, panics
and crashes, Eyewitness to Wall Street is a colorful, dramatic and
revealing work of popular history.
Personal Review: Eyewitness to Wall Street: 400 Years of
Dreamers, Schemers, Busts and Booms by David Colbert
I completed this 369 page "story book" in two days. It had been so
interesting that I just could not put it down. It's no exaggeration to regard it
as a story book. Somehow the reality is more harsh and crueler than
fictitious TV drama and movies, and the history of the investment world is
surely no exception. Back to the book. This is in fact an excellent
collection of writings from books, journals amd newspapers of different
witnesses to the author's selection of major debacles of the past four
centuries. There are twelve parts of unequal period, with a timeline of
critical incidents in the beginning of each part, followed by selected witness
reports as mentioned above. Certainly, not everything could be accounted
detailedly (so I would like to recommend "Devil Take the Hindmost: A
History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor", a book that dug
deeper but not as wide) but readers certainly would have a very correct
idea of what went wrong. As a CFA charterholder (not yet, passed all
three levels of exam but not paid the fees), I strongly recommend AIMR to
put this book into the required list of reading to warn its members of the
limitation of the financial techniques or theories or calculations or integrity
stuff we try to preach. Anyway, a must read for anyone, especially serious

players!p.s. One minor drawback: Soros was not there. He should have
been.
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