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The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000. By John Steele Gordon. New York: Simon & Schuster Trade, 1999. 319 pp. Bibliography, index, notes, and photographs. $25.00. ISBN 0684832879.
Reviewed by Peter Eisenstadt
John Steele Gordon's popular history of Wall Street is the latest addition to a genre that has entertained and frightened readers at least since James Medberry's Men and Mysteries of Wall Street in 1870. Given the recent record levels in trading volume and price levels, Gordon's volume is certainly timely. In keeping with our dominant ethos The Great Game is uniformly triumphalist, an account of Wall Street's victory over external hostility and internal obtuseness to arrive at its current good fortune. Gordon celebrates the dominance of Wall Street as an exemplum of the "invisible hand," how myriad private greed can combine to form stable and successful economic institutions. Gordon's book demonstrates the difficulty of applying contemporary libertarian economic understandings to such an archetypal free-market institution as the New York securities market.
Perhaps the biggest problem with The Great Game is its grudging attitude to any regulation of the securities market, whether self-regulation by the industry or imposed by government. Gordon locates the origins of the New York securities market in an entrepreneurial state of nature, where buyers and sellers did their business in the 1790s without "rules and regulation" (p. 5). This simply is not so. As Stuart Banner recently demonstrated in Anglo-American Securities Regulation, there was no...