Wall Street comes from war, but all profitable industries have Wall Street shadows.
And every war was a war on Wall Street.
Wall Street as a whole is living in uncertainty, where capital gathers and does whatever it takes to make money.
Americans often say they’ve contributed three things to the world: constitutional law, baseball, Wall Street.
Wall Street has lost its reputation these years, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when trillions of dollars suddenly evaporated, millions of people were homeless, and a bunch of bankers sat in the Federal Reserve in New York, threatening to die together without the Treasury Minister’s help.
None of the Wall Streets that had been stabbing the Great Wall Street was subsequently imprisoned for it — no, a man was arrested, a bad guy at Swiss Bank Reissant. After that, United States taxpayers helped Wall Street to escape, and by the end of the year banks paid huge bonuses to stabilize their talent.
The financial crisis has made Americans miserable. Despite the fact that the money borrowed by the bank was returned, the Americans were still upset, and they believed that Wall Street was a bunch of overpaid fools.
Despite America’s current popular hatred for Wall Street, looking back on history, you can see how crucial the role of Wall Street at some important junctures is.
Wall Street was born almost in tandem with the United States, helping the country to complete three major infrastructure projects: the Ely Canal, the Transstate Railway, and the Iron Empire, which led the United States to embark on the path of a capital power. More crucially, Wall Street helped the United States win the civil war, otherwise North America is now no different from South America. Even after World War II, Wall Street worked hard, and there was a relevant story in the film Fathers’ Flag: a leader quickly and badly scolded a few soldiers for their ignorance and told them that if the national debt was not sold, the front-line soldiers would have to take stones and die with the Japanese. It follows that one of Wall Street ‘ s important responsibilities then was to help the United States Government sell its national debt.
What the hell is Wall Street? How does it rise? Why is it so powerful?
I. The origin of Wall Street
Wall Street was first on the stage of history not because of finance, but because of politics. In 1789, six years after the war of independence, the United States finally had a president, Washington, who was sworn in as the first president of the United States in the New York City Hall on Wall Street. That memorial-like building is still in place, with an iconic Washington statue in front of it, which looks dark, with Washington in it standing there with a stick later called fascist.
Wall Street is a very lucky place, and it’s a perfect place for a hundred years. As you all know, New York is a natural port, surrounded by land, with a big water basin in the middle, and a boat can escape the wind. Wall Street is the least windy place in this big port, where everyone is willing to park.
Because of this feature of Wall Street, it was initially used as a warehouse, and the captains temporarily left the goods here, then came out for a little drink or something. For a long time, some flexible people come to the captains to ask if or not to sell, how much to sell, and then let them know the buyer they know, and encourage them to buy, the buyer needs money, and they happen to have a loan. Wall Street 1.0 is on line.
Of course, this business can’t be weathered, but it opens up a new river of history in Wall Street.
Wall Street’s first barrel of gold, money from Europe. In the other America, where business flourished, where new markets were created, the rich in Europe came to invest in the new continent. When they arrived in the Americas, the first thing these investors did was to find people at the ports to learn about local money-making. Well, who should I ask? It’s better than when you go to Computer City to buy computers, there are a few people standing at the door, and the same is true of Wall Street in New York, where when investors get ashore, and then they buy stocks from them. Their role is similar to that of the first “brokers”. Over time, these “brokers” have grown into bridges between companies and capital.
Companies in the United States generally have needs, such as a loan, to find a “broker” on Wall Street. The latter recorded the needs in the book, and the next time someone said they had free money and wanted to make an investment, they would take out the book and see who needed it, so that resources and production would match.
These brokers started working in a café and then joined together to form a trade union-like organization or a club like this, to negotiate with each other not to compete with each other and not to recruit new members. If anyone wished to join, they would have to vote together, with more than a certain percentage of votes. This is the predecessor of the famous New York Stock Exchange, which began with a group of people. And then when you get the money, you start renting more and more spacious workplaces, and the bigger it gets, the ultimate form is the New York Stock Exchange that we’re seeing now, and it’s going to be an American landmark.
II. Spring on Wall Street
It is well known that finance, which seems to be a very deep term, is actually borrowing money to bring together money that is not available at the same time.
For example, the American people are going to build canals to build railways and borrow money from Europeans, which is a transfer of resources in space; in addition, they can finance the future, for example, by buying a house, for the next 30 years. Of course, after entering futures, buying space, selling space, insurance, gambling, gambling agreements, etc., modern finance has become so complicated that no one fully understands it, and even pricing some financial products has become a problem. That is why Wall Street often recruits graduates in mathematics or physics as traders.
In the words of the economist Chen Ping, Wall Street’s people do not believe too much in the invisible hand. Think about it. People on a street can manipulate the whole market, and “the whole market is sitting in an office of the Federal Reserve,” and you’re talking “unseen hands” there.
In the 1930s, Wall Street came to its own spring. It used to be just like micro-businesses, selling cotton, selling insurance. By about 1830, they were playing more and more because the United States was going to fix the railroad. As far as railways are concerned, Marx says: “If it is necessary to wait for the accumulation of personal property to go to the railroads, there will be no railways in the world until now, but it will be done by the stock companies in a moment.” I’m sorry.
Why would Max say that? Because the railroad is too expensive. In the nineteenth century, it was known that railways could be used effectively to promote economic development, and that railways could be repaired by about 20 times less freight (relative to land transport) and that money from the original railways could soon be earned.
The biggest challenge for US railways is where to find the money to build. The last way to go is to go to the United Kingdom — where there was nothing to invest, where capitalists held large amounts of money and spent no place to spend, thinking about investment every day. At this point, the Americans say they’re going to fix the railroad, of course they’re going to fight.
Astronomical capital flows from Europe across the sea to the United States for United States bonds or shares on Wall Street. Wall Street brokers, after charging a certain fee, invested the capital in the construction of United States railways. They took money from the British to buy steel in the United Kingdom to fix the railways, and then they simply borrowed money to build their own steel.
By 1900, the United States produced more steel than the entire European continent, and the British couldn’t sell a pound of steel in the Americas. Since then, Britain has slowly become a capital state, with the first world war, and the manufacturing-stated UK has been unable to cope with the terrible war consumption and has been selling its goods in exchange for American goods. It’s impossible to hold on to World War II, and this is what happened in the film Dunkirk.
In the 19th century, Wall Street was devastated once in a decade, and when it was large, it destroyed 90% of the entire American market. Yeah, 90 percent, 90 percent of the country’s business goes down overnight. Only the Americans knew. These crashes have caused considerable damage to United States enterprises, with a high number of people jumping off buildings each time. The vast majority of the financial tycoons in the history of the United States have ended in misery because they have not been able to escape the stockfall.
But the “benefits” of the crash are also clear. Before 1900, the United States stock market was invested by the British, and every time the stock crash, the great wealth of the British broke. When only a small fraction of the British stock is bought at a high price, Americans buy it back, so that the British train that they invest goes to the Americans themselves, and a transfer of wealth is made. Why don’t the British just stop doing this? Because the speculative mentality of humanity is the same, it will never change.
III. Exploding in iron and blood
By 1860, Wall Street was already a big one, but it was still out of number all over the world until the Americans started fighting themselves. As I have previously written, the American war between the two countries has nothing to do with slavery, or much to do with slavery, and the main problem is economic: High tariffs are needed for the North to take British investment and develop manufacturing; the South needs to catch up with black cotton, and then sells cotton every day to buy British industrial goods, so it has to be low, and the North is not allowed to press tariffs for revenge. For this reason, the North and the South had a fight, and later the discussion was over, and the South wanted to run away. Attention is drawn to the fact that at that time the laws of the United States allowed Southern States to leave the Federation, but then President Lincoln was a vicious man who could not leave the South. This is totally unconstitutional. The decision to wage war was, however, very difficult, as the United States had been depressed for the fourth consecutive year before the war, and the Federation had nothing in the treasury, but owed tens of millions of dollars in national debt (the tens of millions at the time were large). By the time the southern states announced their secession from the Federation in 1860, Lincoln had become so poor that he could not pay the salaries of parliamentarians. A war in such circumstances would be a bit unbearable. Lincoln has repeatedly said to his friends that he could not bear the pressure, that he often stayed up all night, that he feared that he would be the last president of the United States, and that the federation that America’s predecessors had created would collapse. So, you’ll see, when this war comes down, Lincoln becomes detached, like a man. But Lincoln was tough and decided to defend the Federation, and then the war started.
We all made the worst intentions before the war started, and it was only after the war that we discovered that we were still too optimistic. The North-South war was the first war after the industrial revolution, and military leaders on both sides were confused. In the age of the shotguns, the soldiers moved forward shoulder to shoulder, of course, by killing each other, and the casualties of a war were many times the total of eight years of the entire war of independence. Besides, the biggest problem is that without money, we can’t sustain the war. Almost everyone in the Federation was thinking about this at the time, starting with tax increases, and the Federal Government had almost collected all the places that could be taxed, some of whom were too high to pay. To that end, the Lincoln Government had issued a war bill that had established a legendary United States National Revenue Service, with civilian officials carrying rifles door to door to collect taxes. For three feet, they even once sent the Rangers to collect the tax, a tax office that the Federal Government agreed had made a significant contribution to the success of the civil war, because a significant proportion of the war money was collected by the Tax Service, but the revenue from the Tax Administration was far from sufficient. The federal government has set up a money-printing machine, known as “green-backed money.” The conspiracy theory says that Lincoln was killed because of this thing, but it didn’t have a significant impact. It was only 450 million in the war, and only a fraction of it was paid for.
Why don’t you print some more of the $5 greenbacks issued in 1861? Because it would cause superinflation, the civilian population would suffer and be vulnerable. If we don’t make a complete failure on the battlefield, we’ll fight back.
What about the rest of the war money? Yeah, it’s Wall Street. Wall Street will borrow money, the federal government will pay as much as it needs, and shortly thereafter Wall Street will sell them. This model is not a new one, as Britain has been doing since when Napoleon was at war with the United Kingdom to lend to the Bank of England and pay back the money. Used to be a big house subscription, like a private fund, with 1 million sales, making it impossible for many people who want to invest. But Wall Street this time created a new model in which they split the national debt into 50 dollars and then took it to the market for public sale, incited people in newspapers every day to say that buying the national debt was patriotism and said that the national debt could appreciate in the future because of interest.
By selling the national debt, we can also unite all the people of the United States — our sons — who went to war, their families bought the national debt and their families were tied to the federal government. It was also known from the outset that the Lincoln Government in the North would win because the industrial facilities of the United States were in the North and the potential for war in the North exceeded several orders of magnitude in the South. That is why these people, from the very beginning, were so crazy about buying their national debt that they received a counterproductive return after the war. Of course, they were rich before the war, otherwise they couldn’t collect bonds.
This is not the case in the South of the United States, where, owing to the absence of a system of public debt and the fact that taxes are not as popular as in the North, there is nothing left but mad print money, and inflation rose dramatically throughout the war. The Federal Army came in and the whole of the major cities of the south were burned down, the farms were destroyed, and inflation left the population in a state of misery and finally lost.
Wall Street has also evolved a new business — the gold trade. Gold was in hard currency during the war years, and Wall Street was given the opportunity to start arbitrage during the civil war. How? It’s not that complicated. If a big war goes down and the North loses, it’s going to burn the war to its own door, and when the troops are in disarray and need hard currency like gold, it’s going to rob the gold and appreciate it. If you win, you’ll be relieved that the gold in your hand will be depreciated, rather than buy something else, so you can sell it together, causing the gold to depreciate. In the event of volatility, arbitrage was achieved, and Wall Streeters leveraged and speculated on gold, for example, after a great victory, before they sold it when they lost.
In order to get the news as soon as possible, Wall Streeters often send people on the battlefield to watch the outcome of the war. If you win, go all the way to New York and tell them to sell; if you lose, buy. Later, Lincoln found that the battle papers were not as good as watching Wall Street gold rise and fall. The war lasted four years, during which the entire south of the United States was burned to the ground, the north was dying, the Government was in debt, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed, and millions were homeless. But Wall Street swelled dozens of times in the process, climbing from its pre-war invisibility to its second largest financial center in the world, to the size of London.
Almost no one talks about what happened to black people after the American-North war. When the post-war government demanded that southern farmers pay land taxes, the south was razed to the ground and what would it pay? So a large number of farms were sold to northern industrialists, who first went south to drive the black people off the farm and then build factories to get white people to work. Black people are in pain and become free and bad, and it’s been years since blacks and whites worked together.
If the farms were not sold by the farmers, the black people would continue to grow cotton on the farms. It’s clear from the novel “Fly.” So the black people were never grateful to the Republicans for their liberation, they had always supported the Democrats, and the Republicans were not aware of the liberation of the blacks. For Wall Street, it doesn’t matter, because after the war the United States has come to the fastest stage in history. The fire boils oil, which is a post-war reconstruction, and a major Western development, and the natural wealth continues to be transferred from Europe to the United States, where it is built, and is then almost clean in the Great Crisis of 1879. Of course, the Americans themselves lost a lot. Grant won the southern rebels with the Northern Federal Army, then became president, retired, and paid off decades of savings by writing books.
IV. THE MADLY WALST
Wall Street emerged from the American war of independence, from the American civil war, and truly outpaced London, Britain, as the world’s leading financial capital, in the first World War. During the First World War, Wall Street bought almost all of Britain’s heavy assets overseas at very low prices. The British were in desperate need of money to go to war and sold everything to Morgan, who changed hands and sold it at twice and three times.
After the war, Wall Street invested its potential in Germany, which was the fastest-growing country in the world, with capital chasing only fast-growing economies, just as British capital went to the United States. Finally, Wall Street was completely proud of the world after the Second World War. As you can see, every war is an outbreak on Wall Street, because if you go to war, there’s a natural resource to go around, and that’s what the financial center does, and the geese pull out, and they charge a fee for every payment, and it’s getting bigger and bigger. Wall Street as a whole is living in uncertainty, where capital gathers and does whatever it takes to make money.
Wall Street, home to the war, is the shadow of Wall Street in all profitable industries. Record number: YX11dPNwNVM
I don’t know.
Keep your eyes on the road.
