I learned that Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the actual street which is eight blocks long. Over time, the term has come to mean the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or New York-based financial interests.
Wall St. is the home of the New York Stock Exchange. A stock exchange is a place where people called brokers buy and sell stocks for their customers. There are many stock exchanges throughout the world. The largest one is the New York Stock Exchange, often called the NYSE. It began exchanging stocks in 1792. In that year, 24 brokers got together under a buttonwood tree and signed a contract vowing that they would trade only with one another. It became known as the Buttonwood Agreement.
From this the NYSE has grown into the largest exchange in the world. It is located on 18 Broad Street. Six marble columns are on the outside of the building. It has 16 separate trading floors. Electronic boards on two of the walls give the latest information on the stock values. These big boards may have helped give the exchange its nickname-the Big Board.
I was very lucky that a friend of Mrs. Gauthier’s works on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, so I got to take a tour. It was very loud and a little scary! All the stock brokers were yelling and talking on their cell phones, while watching the numbers change on the big electronic boards. I didn’t really understand any of it, but it was very exciting! Then at 4:00 PM a very funny thing happened. A bell rang and all the yelling and talking suddenly stopped! They explained to me that all trading ceases at 4:00 PM every day, and the stock brokers can’t do any more work buying and selling stocks until the bell rings again at 9:30 AM tomorrow morning.
On my tour of the NYSE, I asked about the “Wall St. financial crisis”. The tour guide told me that it is a very complicated problem that was caused by Wall St. companies who got very greedy, trying to make more and more money. I asked her why it was a problem for the Wall St. companies to make more money, when it was their job to make money. She explained that there were a lot of things involved in the problem, but one of the biggest was that many of the big Wall St. companies raised the value of homes in the U.S., and then allowed people to borrow more money against their homes than the homes were actually worth. They big companies didn’t invest any of the money they made from these loans wisely, and instead, the bosses of the companies used the money to pay for vacations, cars, fancy houses, jewelry, and other extravagant things. When the time came to repay all of the loans, there was no money left and that was what caused the financial crisis that Mayor Bloomberg thought he could help fix by remaining in office for a third term.
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