Book Review: Business Adventures

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street - John Brooks

Overall, this was a mildly entertaining book.  I enjoyed several of the tales, including those on insider trading, the sterling pound crisis, trade secrets, and communication at GE, but found a few of the others quite dry and not terribly interesting.

As usual, here are a few quotes:
Any board-room sitter with a taste for Wall Street lore has heard the retort that J.P. Morgan the Elder is supposed to have made to a naive acquaintance who had ventured to ask the great man what the market was going to do. "It will fluctuate," replied Morgan dryly.

On the Stock Exchange floor itself, there was no question of any sort of rally; it was simply a case of all stocks' declining rapidly and steadily, on enormous volume. As de la Vega might have described the scene--as, in fact, he did rather flamboyantly describe a similar scene--"The bears [that is, the sellers] are completely ruled by fear, trepidation, and nervousness. Rabbits become elephants, brawls in a tavern become rebellions, faint shadows appear to them as signs of chaos."