The Last Partnerships: Inside the Great Wall Street Dynasties
     by Charles R. Geisst

     McGraw-Hill   (March 21, 2001)

      The book provides a general history of Wall Street, organized in chronological chapters, each featuring two famous houses. The first chapter covers 1812 to 1873, focusing on Clark Dodge and Jay Cooke. The last chapter runs from the 1930s to the present, featuring Lazard Freres and Goldman Sachs.

Description

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.

Contents

Introduction.
Chapter 1: The Yankee Banking Houses: Clark Dodge and Jay Cooke.
Chapter 2: "Our Crowd": The Seligmans, Lehman Brothers, and Kuhn Loeb.
Chapter 3: White Shoes and Racehorses: Brown Brothers Harriman and August Belmont.
Chapter 4: Crashed and Absorbed: Kidder Peabody and Dillon Read.
Chapter 5: Corner of Broad and Wall: J. P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley.
Chapter 6: Corner of Wall and Main: Merrill Lynch and E. F. Hutton.
Chapter 7: Unraveled by Greed: Salomon Brothers and Drexel Burnham.
Chapter 8: The Last Holdouts: Goldman Sachs and Lazard Freres.

Comments (0)

Show/Hide comments

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment