The Money Machine

Wall Street is named for an actual wall—a wooden stockade built by Dutch settlers at the edge of New Amsterdam. But American finance was born of the Revolution’s debts. Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary, made the young republic creditworthy by assuming the states’ war debts, founding the first national bank, and creating the securities that needed trading. On May 17, 1792, twenty-four brokers met under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street and signed a two-sentence pact to trade with one another—the Buttonwood Agreement, the founding document of what became the New York Stock Exchange. From that sidewalk arrangement grew the deepest capital markets in human history: the machine that financed the railroads, the factories, the wars, the suburbs, and the internet.