Wall Street

street in Manhattan

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs between Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry, New York–based financial interests, or the Financial District itself.

Wall Street
The New York Stock Exchange building
For the film, see Wall Street (1987 film).

Wall Street is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Several other major exchanges have or had headquarters in the Wall Street area, including the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Board of Trade, the New York Futures Exchange (NYFE), and the former American Stock Exchange.

Quotes

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  • Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.
  • Charlie and I cringe when we hear analysts talk admiringly about managements who always “make the numbers.” In truth, business is too unpredictable for the numbers always to be met. Inevitably, surprises occur. When they do, a CEO whose focus is centered on Wall Street will be tempted to make up the numbers.
  • No man can control Wall Street. Wall Street is like the ocean. No man can govern it. It is too vast. Wall Street is full of eddies and currents. The thing to do is to watch them, to exercise a little common sense, and … to come out on top.
  • Wall Street is where prophets tell us what will happen and profits tell us what did happen.
    • Greg Heberlein (September 28, 1986) "'Doctor' Lefevre Seeks Cure For Hospitalized Bull Market", The Seattle Times, p. C2.
  • Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy. Good times coming. Good times have come. Listening to the strains of genuine negro ragtime, brokers forget their cares.
  • The essential is the object. Error consists in forgetting that grain, cotton, wool are vital objects and in being interested in them only because of their value in gold, their speculative value. The economic purpose is not ‘to make millionaires out of gasoline’ but to distribute gasoline according to demand and need. Wall street is an abstraction.
    • Fernand Léger, exhibition catalogue, John Becker Gallery, New York, March 1933
  • I think of Wall Street guys as the crookedest in the world...
    • Mario Puzo, The first interview he granted after the publication of The Godfather, quoted in Jacquin Sanders, 'Mario Puzo: Author of ‘The Godfather’', The News-Herald (March 18, 1970), p. 25
  • Mutual funds are an overrated investment heavily promoted by Wall Street.
  • Holding the citizens of Wall Street to the standards of honesty which govern everyone else is, if one thinks about it, the very opposite of class warfare.

See also

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