They laid the foundations of American finance and defined the American brand of capitalism. They bankrolled wars, were the impetus behind the building of the first transcontinental railroad system, and fueled a fledgling nation’s grandiose dreams of empire. S&M Allen, J. P. Morgan & Co., Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers...they were the great Wall Street partnerships, and for well over a century, through a combination of financial genius, political chicanery, and the audacity of Caesars, they wielded unprecedented influence over the business, financial, and political landscapes of a nation.The Last Partnerships combines rigorous scholarship with journalism at its best to present a panoramic history of the rise and fall of the great financial houses—from the “Yankee Bankers,” at the turn of the 19th century, up to Goldman Sachs’ historic IPO in 1999—tracing their origins, their successes and failures over the years, and the reasons for their ultimate demise. The Last Partnerships is must-reading for history buffs and everyone interested in the world of finance behind the business-page headlines.

In the seven years since the publication of the first edition of Wall Street, America's financial industry has undergone a series of wrenching events that have dramatically changed the nation's economic landscape. The bull market of the 1990's came to a close, ushering in the end of the dot com boom, a record number of mergers occurred, and accounting scandals in companies like Enron and WorldCom shook the financial industry to its core. In this wide-ranging volume, financial historian Charles Geisst provides the first history of Wall Street, explaining how a small, concentrated pocket of lower Manhattan came to have such enormous influence in national and world affairs. In this updated edition, Geisst sums up the recent turbulence that has threatened America's financial industry. He shows how in 1997 thirty NASDAQ market makers paid a record $1.3 billion fine for price irregularities in stocks. He makes sense of the closing of the bull market, and explains a major change in the accounting rules for mergers that caused monumental losses for companies like AOL Time Warner. And he recounts how in the aftermath of the speculative fever that swept Wall Street in the 1990's, the scandals at Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and Conseco represent a last gasp of mergermania and a fallout from a bubble-like market. Wall Street is at once the story of the street itself, from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant, to the modern billion-dollar computer-driven colossus of today. In a broader sense it is an engaging economic history of the United States, the role Wall Street played in making America the most powerful economy in the world, and the many challenges to that role it has faced in recent years.

On September 11, 1844, Henry Lehman arrived in New York City on a boat from Germany. Soon after, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he and his brother Emanuel established a modest cotton brokering firm that would come to be called Lehman Brothers. On September 15, 2008, Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy amid one of the worst financial crises in American history. After 164 years, one of the largest and most respected investment banks in the world was gone, leaving everyone wondering, "How could this have happened?" Peter Chapman, an editor and writer for The Financial Times, answers this question by exploring the complete history of Lehman Brothers between those two historic Septembers. He takes us back to its early days as a cotton broker in Alabama, and then to its glory days as one of the leading corporate financiers in America. He also provides an intimate portrait of the people who ran Lehman over the decades-from Henry Lehman, the founder, to Bobbie Lehman, who led the company into the world of radio, motion pictures, and air travel in first part of the 20th century, to Dick Fuld, who allowed it to morph into a dealer of shoddy securities. Throughout his account of this imperiously rich firm, Chapman examines the impact Lehman Brothers had not only on American finance but also on American life. As a major backer of companies like Pan American Airlines, Macy's, and RKO, Lehman helped lead the country into major new industries and helped support some of its most intrepid entrepreneurs. He then shows how, starting in the 1980s, Lehman's increased focus on short-term gain investments led the firm down the dangerous path that would eventually lead to its demise. In the end, the story of Lehman Brothers is not only the story of a truly important American company but a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders lose sight of their core mission in their quest for something too good to be true. Praise for The Last of the Imperious Rich: "Thought provoking and illuminating" - The New York Times "Chapman has succeeded in holding up a mirror to America's past - and what its future might hold" - Bloomberg

Gentlemen Bankers investigates the social and economic circles of one of America’s most renowned and influential financiers to uncover how the Morgan family’s power and prestige stemmed from its unique position within a network of local and international relationships. At the turn of the twentieth century, private banking was a personal enterprise in which business relationships were a statement of identity and reputation. In an era when ethnic and religious differences were pronounced and anti-Semitism was prevalent, Anglo-American and German-Jewish elite bankers lived in their respective cordoned communities, seldom interacting with one another outside the business realm. Ironically, the tacit agreement to maintain separate social spheres made it easier to cooperate in purely financial matters on Wall Street. But as Susie Pak demonstrates, the Morgans’ exceptional relationship with the German-Jewish investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co., their strongest competitor and also an important collaborator, was entangled in ways that went far beyond the pursuit of mutual profitability. Delving into the archives of many Morgan partners and legacies, Gentlemen Bankers draws on never-before published letters and testimony to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century.

For decades, the public company has played a dominant role in the American economy. Since the middle of the 20th century, the nature of the public company has changed considerably. The transformation has been a fascinating one, marked by scandals, political controversy, wide swings in investor and public sentiment, mismanagement, entrepreneurial verve, noisy corporate "raiders" and various other larger-than-life personalities. Nevertheless, amidst a voluminous literature on corporations, a systematic historical analysis of the changes that have occurred is lacking. The Public Company Transformed correspondingly analyzes how the public company has been recast from the mid-20th century through to the present day, with particular emphasis on senior corporate executives and the constraints affecting the choices available to them. The chronological point of departure is the managerial capitalism era, which prevailed in large American corporations following World War II. The book explores managerial capitalism's rise, its 1950s and 1960s heyday, and its fall in the 1970s and 1980s. It describes the American public companies and executives that enjoyed prosperity during the 1990s, and the reversal of fortunes in the 2000s precipitated by corporate scandals and the financial crisis of 2008. The book also considers the regulation of public companies in detail, and discusses developments in shareholder activism, company boards, chief executives, and concerns about oligopoly. The volume concludes by offering conjectures on the future of the public corporation, and suggests that predictions of the demise of the public company have been exaggerated.

In the seven years since the publication of the first edition of Wall Street, America's financial industry has undergone a series of wrenching events that have dramatically changed the nation's economic landscape. The bull market of the 1990's came to a close, ushering in the end of the dot com boom, a record number of mergers occurred, and accounting scandals in companies like Enron and WorldCom shook the financial industry to its core. In this wide-ranging volume, financial historian Charles Geisst provides the first history of Wall Street, explaining how a small, concentrated pocket of lower Manhattan came to have such enormous influence in national and world affairs. In this updated edition, Geisst sums up the recent turbulence that has threatened America's financial industry. He shows how in 1997 thirty NASDAQ market makers paid a record $1.3 billion fine for price irregularities in stocks. He makes sense of the closing of the bull market, and explains a major change in the accounting rules for mergers that caused monumental losses for companies like AOL Time Warner. And he recounts how in the aftermath of the speculative fever that swept Wall Street in the 1990's, the scandals at Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and Conseco represent a last gasp of mergermania and a fallout from a bubble-like market. Wall Street is at once the story of the street itself, from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant, to the modern billion-dollar computer-driven colossus of today. In a broader sense it is an engaging economic history of the United States, the role Wall Street played in making America the most powerful economy in the world, and the many challenges to that role it has faced in recent years.

DEALS OF THE CENTURY Throughout history, mergers and acquisitions have been the major game played on Wall Street. These deals have had far-reaching effects, on the worlds of finance and industry - more than most commentators or financiers are publicly willing to admit. Deals of the Century captures this dynamic moment in history by taking an in-depth look at the most notable merger and acquisition deals of the twentieth of Carnegie Steel in 1901 to the creation of the former AOL Time Warner, renowned business historian and bestselling author Charles Geisst traces the deals that have had the most dramatic impact on the worlds of both finance and industry over the past century. Decade by decade, you'll be introduced to the personalities behind each event, as industries are built, dismantled, and reorganized by "professionals" driven mainly by the profits extracted from the deals themselves. Engaging and informative, Deals of the Century paints an exciting portrait of the incredible M&A journey and illustrates how many of these deals changed the face of business, creating a modern capitalist society that continues to grow.