Home » Articles » Jay Gould

Wall Street’s 10 Most Notorious Stock Traders

The country’s financial hub has a long history of lying, cheating, and stealing

John Steele Gordon
Spring 2009

No one likes recessions, but no one dislikes them more than the crooks who are an inevitable part of any financial market.

As the economy goes south, companies seeking to cut costs scrutinize their books more carefully and bring embezzlements to light. Investors take money out of higher-earning (and therefore inherently more risky) funds and put them into safer ones, and Ponzi schemes collapse as a result. Credit becomes tighter, and loan requests are more carefully investigated, so businesses with cooked books find their insolvency revealed. Read more »

The American Heritage

A ranking of the forty wealthiest Americans of all time (Surprise: Only three of them are alive today)

Christine Gibson
October 1998

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

1839-1937 Read more »

Larcenous Mrs. Cody Vs. Pious Miss Gould

Frank Kintrea
June 1975

Throughout the summer and fall of 1898 a lady named Margaret E. Cody, aged seventy-five or there-about, was a reluctant guest of the county jail in Albany, New York. Mrs. Cody’s preferred residence was in Denver, Colorado, where she and her long-deceased husband had once been leading citizens.

“I am one of the pioneers of Denver,” she said proudly. “I helped to make that city what it is.” Read more »

The Capital Of Capitalism

Ever since 1792, bulls and bears together have tripped the light fantastic on Wall Street’s sidewalks—and sometimes just tripped

Curtis Webber
December 1972

On a cold Saturday in December, 1865, the 350 members of the New York Stock Exchange gave a party to celebrate moving into a new building on Broad Street, near the corner of Wall—the first home of their own. “One of the finest temples of Mammon extant,” the New York Times observed. Visitors poured through the spacious lower hall and up the wide stairs to enjoy refreshments in the high-ceilinged, black-walnut-panelled Board Room, whose acoustics had already been tested at a brief stock auction that morning.Read more »

By Way Of Contrast: “Uncle Dan” Drew

February 1959

Daniel Drew (1797–1879) was a short, chunky man with a face as seamed and wrinkled as a prune; he walked with a stealthy tread, like a cat; his attire was downright dowdy; he affected the bland, who-me? air of a hedgerow parson. Yet for a quarter-century this man was one of the most justly feared in the financial circles of nineteenth-century America.

Read more »