Posted on January 15, 2023
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An article from Human Progress
While many major cities lay in ruins after World War II, New York gained new global prominence and even overtook London’s central position in international financial markets. It quickly became the home of Wall Street, the world’s largest and most prestigious stock exchange, and changed finance forever. Wall Street is often considered both a symbol and the geographic center of capitalism.
Today, New York City is the most populous city in the United States, with over 8 million people. And with over 20 million people, the New York metropolitan area is one of the most populous megacities in the world.
In the American psyche, New York represents an opportunity. Ellis Island was the historic gateway through which many immigrants came to the country during the 19th and 20th centuries, and New York remains a popular destination for immigrants to the United States. In fact, it is perhaps the most “linguistically diverse” city in the world with hundreds of languages spoken within its territory.
New York is also where ambitious Americans of all persuasions traditionally travel to make a name for themselves in industries as diverse as writing, acting, business, fashion, media, investment banking, and more. And those who succeed often stay in the area. New York has more billionaire residents than any other city. The nicknames of the metropolis are numerous: the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple, Gotham, the capital of the world (popularized by the author of Charlotte’s WebEB White), the largest city in the world and in the surrounding area, simply the city.
The cultural and economic importance of New York is difficult to estimate. The city is a popular tourist spot, home to the iconic Statue of Liberty, the imposing Empire State Building, the famous Broadway theater district and the bustle of Times Square where the famous New Year’s Eve balloon release takes place. As such, New York has been called the most photographed city in the world. It is estimated that if the New York metropolitan area were a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world (a rank currently held by Italy). The city is also a research center that is home to more than a hundred colleges and universities including New York University, Columbia University and Rockefeller University.
The city’s geography may have intended it to be a center of commerce. Located in one of the largest natural harbors in the world, the site where New York stands today was a logical place for human settlement. Originally, the area was inhabited by the Lenape people and other Native American tribes. They used the natural waterways for fishing, trade, and warfare with neighboring tribes. The first European to visit the site was an Italian, Giovanni da Verrazzano, who explored the region in the service of the French, in 1524. He baptized the region “New Angoulême”, in honor of the French king François Ier (who was called François d’Angoulême before ascending the throne of France) and quickly left.
Then, in 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson (the namesake of Hudson’s Bay) arrived. He too quickly left but not before noticing the large population of beavers. Beaver pelts were a precious commodity. News of Hudson’s discovery spread quickly and prompted the Dutch to found several fur trading posts in the area in the early 17th century. Among these in 1624 was a colony in what is now Manhattan, initiated by the Dutch West India Company. In 1626 the Dutch had built Fort Amsterdam which would serve as the city’s nucleus until the fort’s demolition in 1790. The city was appropriately named New Amsterdam and served as the capital of the local Dutch colonies collectively dubbed New Netherland. Even today, several neighborhood names retain Dutch origins, notably Harlem and Brooklyn (from Breukelen).
Although it ended in a Dutch victory, the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667) saw the British take control of the city as part of a treaty. In exchange, the British ceded to the Dutch what is now Suriname and Run, a small nutmeg-producing island in what is now Indonesia. At the time, it seemed the Dutch had done a much better deal than the British: nutmeg was extremely valuable and the island complex that includes Run was famous in Europe while New Amsterdam was a relatively obscure outpost. “Few would have believed that a small trading village on Manhattan Island was destined to become the modern metropolis of New York,” according to Australian historian Ian Burnet.
After the exchange, New Amsterdam was quickly renamed New York after the title of Duke of York from the brother of the King of England. It was he who led the campaign to conquer the city during the war. The city grew rapidly. In 1700, New York had a population of nearly 5,000. At the time of American independence in 1776, New York’s population was approximately 25,000. In 1800, the city had about 60,000 inhabitants. Boosted by immigration, it numbered well over 3 million in 1900.
New York City took on its central importance in the post-war period. The Germans never followed up on their plan to bomb it, judging the operation too costly. Thus spared the protective breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, New York emerged from World War II not only unscathed but prosperous and poised to dominate business and culture.
By the late 1940s, New York had become the largest manufacturing center in the world, with 40,000 factories, one million workers, and the world’s busiest port handling 150 million tons of cargo annually. New York has suddenly become the city of choice for many large international companies including Standard Oil, General Electric and IBM. The nickname “Headquarters City” is added to the collection of nicknames of the metropolis. Even the United Nations, which had just been created, had its headquarters in New York (built from 1947 to 1952).
In 1947 the British writer JB Priestley remembers:
“The New York of 40 years ago was an American city, but the sparkling cosmopolis of today belongs to the world, if the world does not belong to it”.
The city inherited the role of Paris as the center of the world of art and fashion. New York is a haven for foreign artists fleeing war-torn Europe like Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and a hotbed of creativity for revolutionary American artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). The city’s musical influence also grew rapidly, from influential renditions of classical music by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to bebop, the new form of music created in Harlem’s nightclubs that would take the world by storm.
Above all, the city was at the center of post-war globalization. British writer Beverly Nichols described the state of the megalopolis in 1948:
“We had the feeling that New York was a big international city to which all the ends of the world had gone. London used to be like that but somehow we forgot about it so long ago that Hispanos and Isotas [voitures de luxe d’Espagne et d’Italie, respectivement] had slipped on Piccadilly, so many years ago that tropical fruit shone in the windows of Bond Street. Coming from that kind of London in America, New York had once seemed just American; not typical of the continent, perhaps, but above all American. Now it was the center of the world. »
This is how New York, newly internationalized, became the financial capital of the world and the seat of the two largest stock exchanges in the world: the New York Stock Exchange and, later, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ).
From its humble origins in 1792, when 24 brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement, establishing a securities trading operation in the city, the New York Stock Exchange has thrived in the face of adversity. The American Civil War (1861-1865) helped expand the financial district by promoting securities trading, and the stock exchange moved to its present location at 11 Wall Street in 1865. But it was World War II that allowed the stock exchange to achieve unparalleled global prominence.
Credit cards were also among the financial innovations of post-war New York. In 1946, a banker named John Biggins came up with the idea of creating credit cards that could be used in different stores in the Brooklyn neighborhood of New York. Merchants could deposit receipts at Flatbush National Bank in Biggins who then billed cardholders.
In 1989 an iconic bronze statue known as the Charging Bull or Wall Street Bull was erected in the Financial District of Manhattan to represent capitalism and prosperity. (a pun on the term “bull market” which refers to positive market trends).
As a symbol of capitalism, Wall Street became the target of the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street protest movement in 2011. Protesters worried about economic inequality, fearing that the prosperity created by the market system was not widely shared. In reality, the Gordon Gekko-types are hardly the only beneficiaries of the financial markets. Wall Street plays an invaluable role in everything from making it easier for ordinary Americans to retire through their 401(k) plans to funding promising innovations that widen the economic pie and raise living standards. As my former colleague and securities lawyer Thaya Brook Knight said:
“Basically, this is what Wall Street does: it makes sure that companies that do useful things get the money they need to keep doing it. Do you love your smartphone? Does it make your life easier? The company that made this phone got the money to develop the product and put it on sale in the store you bought it from, with help from Wall Street. When a company wants to expand, make a new product or improve its old products, it needs money and it often gets this money by selling stocks or bonds. This helps those businesses, the wider economy, and consumers in general. »
New York City remains the world’s premier financial center and the heart of the American financial industry, to the point that “Wall Street” has become shorthand for financial capitalism itself. While many still regard Wall Street as the world’s financial center, new technologies have made it possible to increasingly decentralize investment. Today, anyone can buy and sell stocks using a smartphone while enjoying the comfort of their own home, and internet forums with names like Wall Street Bets can compete with traders of Wall Street literally. However, everyone who shares the economic benefits of the financial industry should thank New York City for taking banking to new heights. It is rightly our twenty-eighth Progress Center.
Counterpoint Translation
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2023-01-15 08:00:00
#Progress #Centers #York #finance
