Keeping an eye on the Wall Street ball

Jay Gould’s name may not resonate much with modern British followers of financial markets, but it ought to. He was one of the cleverest dealers ever to corner a commodity, short a share or (allegedly) drive a fleeced former partner to suicide. At his death in 1892, this ‘king of the robber barons’ left $72 million — more than half of it made in a single transaction in the shares of the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads — which puts him on a par with the banker J. P. Morgan, who left $80 million in 1912. Fleet Street’s readers certainly knew what to think at the time of Gould’s passing: the London Evening Standard condemned him to eternal fire as a ‘wrecker of industries and an impoverisher of men’ while the Evening News thought him ‘less a man than a machine for churning money’.

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP