Product Description

An insider’s look at the changing balance of power on Wall Street

The Battle for Wall Street follows the struggle for power between two giants: the sellers, traditional commercial and investments banks; and the buyers, upstart hedge funds, private equity firms and the like. The battle is about winning the hearts, minds, and – yes, the wallets – of global investors. This battle is still running its course, and with the insights of industry veteran Richard Goldberg, who has had a front row seat, readers will gain a detailed understanding as to what, exactly, is going on within this dynamic arena, specifically the forces behind the shift of power from the old sell side gatekeepers to the new buy side players.   The book will play out in three acts: Act One will examine the instruments of change – liquidity and financial technology – along with their influence on the sell and buy sides. Act Two will look at the agents of change – hedge funds, private equity, financial entrepreneurs, endowments, exchanges and sovereign wealth funds – and their impact on the sell and buy sides. In Act Three, Goldberg will take out his crystal ball and walk through the strategic implications for the winners and losers in this battle, against the dramatic backdrop of the subprime mortgage crisis and the resulting shakeup of global firms like Bear Stearns.

But Wall Street isn’t simply about institutions or corporate battles. It’s a landscape dominated by personalities. Goldberg’s unique access to major players will bring this book to life with amazing anecdotes and stories about the financial generals who have left their mark in The Battle for Wall Street.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #540322 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .90" h x 6.45" w x 9.30" l, .85 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470222799
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From the Inside Flap
A conflict of epic financial proportions has begun on Wall Street and will continue to rage on in the coming years. The opposing forces are the sellers: an army of commercial and investment bankers; and the buyers: an army of hedge fund managers and private equity groups. It is a battle about power—and about winning the hearts, minds, and wallets of the investment community. In The Battle for Wall Street, twenty-five-year Wall Street veteran Richard Goldberg analyzes the struggle for power between traditional sell-side financial institutions—who have seen their dominance upended during the 2008 financial crisis—and buy-side newcomers, and tells what it means for you and your financial future.

Goldberg explains how, for over 100 years, the sellers held all the power. They made markets, controlled information about markets, and largely managed markets, while buyers were participants with limited power or influence, or none at all. He shows how, with the revolution in information technology, buyers gained access to the same data as the sellers and quickly became an equally powerful force in the marketplace—just as the numerous new pools of liquidity made money more readily available. The author examines the various drivers of large-scale trading technology, the "agents of change" that include private equity, hedge funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and the major exchanges that are fast becoming global financial supermarkets.

With an insider's eye, he looks at the various strategies and initiatives currently under way as a wide range of powerful firms fight to manipulate this new generation of financial technology to their advantage. Throughout the book, he draws on the experiences of many of the sell- and buy-side "generals" in the battle.

With prominent sell-side players either out of business or humbled into restructuring as commercial banks, Goldberg offers dire predictions for some and success for others. And as Goldberg reveals the factors that will create future winners, those who stay ahead of these changes will profit in their careers and their investments. This book will be your guide.

From the Back Cover
An insider's look at the changing balance of power on Wall Street

A monumental battle is raging in the ever-shifting, always tumultuous world of Wall Street. The Battle for Wall Street follows the struggle for power between two giants: the sellers, traditional commercial and investment banks; and the buyers, upstart hedge funds, private equity firms, and the like.

Richard Goldberg—who has spent thirty years working with financial industry leaders—gives you a detailed understanding of what is going on in this dynamic arena and the forces behind the shift of power from the old sell-side gatekeepers to the new buy-side players.

The Battle for Wall Street examines the instruments of change—liquidity and financial technology—and the agents of change: hedge funds, private equity, financial entrepreneurs, endowments, exchanges, and sovereign wealth funds. Even more importantly, it outlines the strategic implications for the winners and losers. Goldberg describes all this against the dramatic backdrop of the subprime mortgage and credit crisis and the resulting capitulation of global firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

Goldberg's unique access to major players brings this book to life with fascinating anecdotes and stories about the financial generals who have left their mark in the battle for Wall Street.

About the Author
Richard Goldberg is a twenty-five-year Wall Street veteran with Lehman Brothers, Lazard, and Wasserstein Perella. He has been a banker to the banks and advised on a number of transformational financial services transactions. He is also a faculty member at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and has taught at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and Brandeis University's International Business School.

Customer Reviews

Quite Bad.
As of this writing, 24 reviews have been posted, 23 of them being 5-star. The overwhelming number of 5-star reviews are what sold me the book. And now I feel very cheated. I can only surmise that most of these reviews are from Mr. Goldberg's college students.

Do yourself a very big favor and pass this one up - that is, unless you're looking for a VERY simplistic and poorly presented analysis of goings on in the financial system.

The book's organizing principle is what Mr. Goldberg calls the competition between Wall Street "buyers" and Wall Street "sellers". Prior to purchase, I thought that Mr. Goldberg, armed with this apparently creative distinction, would provide a penetrating and illuminating analysis - especially since he is a former financial insider, and especially since so many reviewers here have given this work 5 stars.

Wow, I couldn't have been more wrong...

From the Introduction:
"The battle is primarily between two giant armies - the buyers, whose soldiers come from such places as hedge funds; and the sellers, whose armed forces come from such places as hybrid commercial/investment banks."

With this organizing principle now established (really ?????), Mr. Goldberg commences from page one to simply start firing away, pouring forth information about financial matters without ever offering a clear definition as to what, exactly, constitutes "buy side" versus "sell side" activity.

To make matters worse, the manner of presentation is cursory and difficult to follow. Literally speaking, one paragraph will describe some aspect of the buy side; then the next paragraph will say something about the sell side; then back to the buy side; then back to the sell side; etc. Meanwhile, Mr. Goldberg relies exclusively on the highly amorphous terms "sell side" and "buy side" over and over the entire way. And all of this takes place absent use of any other major organizing principle. The reader is thus tasked with the unwelcome burden of reaching through this conceptual mess into the text to pull out the so called useful information: incessantly simplistic descriptions and analysis of important financial events and phenomena.

1 star: The information contained indeed has value, but is astonishingly unsophisticated and horribly presented and could easily be found elsewhere. The book's central selling point - the big to-do of "sell side" versus "buy side" - is essentially worthless imho: as presented by Mr. Goldberg, it is a greatly superficial and utterly imprecise distinction, offering the reader no meaningful insight.

Ugh. This book is painful. The universe just ate my $20.


Edit: Upon closer inspection, I see that 12 of the 5-star reviews originate from Massachusetts, and 5 more originate from New York and Connecticut. And almost without exception, all authors have written a grand total of 1 Amazon book review each. I would hardly be surprised to learn that several other reviewers now temporarily reside in Massachusetts, and within a small radius of the college where Mr. Goldberg teaches.

In other words, this book is a total piece of cheese, to put it kindly, and it appears that a great many (ahem...nearly all) of the 23 5-star reviews published thus far are of questionable accuracy regarding the book's true worth: Buyer beware indeed.

From a graduate student of Finance
By way of disclosure, I should probably make clear that I was a student of the author, and I consider his class one of the highlights of my graduate studies at Columbia University. So of course when I came to read the book my predisposition was to like it. However, I did not know I would be compelled to write my first Amazon review over it- but, alas, here I am. Soon enough you'll know why that is.

The book's topic, by way or understatement, is topical. Even if one worked diligently it would be hard, if not impossible, to block out financial and economic news over the past year. They have filtered through from the Business Pages unto the Front Page and rightly so. Industry is grinding to a halt, jobs are dissipating, and wallets are shrinking. The real economy is hurting.

At the center of that upheaval is -what I consider- a rather nebulous place called Wall Street. Most people have a basic understanding of what it comprises: stocks, money managers, investing. Thrown in are a few stereotypes about the industry and its characters: the villainous financier in the eponymous movie or a flock of pompous yuppies in expensive suits (some of them are true). However, Wall Street has changed violently over the last twenty years, and -for better or, more likely, for worse- that basic understanding will not suffice to understand why its troubles are reverberating through the system and why they might -or already are- affecting you.

It has never seemed fair to me, throughout the current global financial tribulations, that so much hardship has fallen on people that had no clear understanding of what just happened. Now, almost always, the most complete way to gain a firm grasp on it is to work your behind off, invest a whole lot of money, and follow in the footsteps of people like me who have opted to continue their education even beyond college. The second best, and a more readily accessible manner, is to read up on the literature (i.e. not financial headlines or columns) that professors like Richard Goldberg and others are putting out there. Considering this book is basically his class -sans the weekly reading assignments and final project- it is one of the best places to start doing just that. And that is why I wrote this review.

This is not a financial advice book and, to be perfectly honest, I would not recommend it if were. People studying finance -ideally- are not out to find some pretty, perfect, fail-safe strategy for investing (those don't exist). We are, simply, after a better understanding of it. In essence, with this book, Goldberg is helping everyone do that by explaining, in as straight-forward way as possible (with a bit of humor thrown in), how Wall Street functions now and why.

Good case studies approach to examining the negative impact of derivatives and credit debt swaps
The author does a solid job in showing how the world's commercial and investment banks massive use of leverage,collateralized debt obligations,and credit default swaps led to an unparalleled collapse in financial markets worldwide that has required the major central banks of the world to make available a total of some 20 trillion dollars at very low interest rates in order to bail these financial institutions out.The author uses a very effective case study approach that allows the reader to see the great similarities between the speculative strategies being used by financial institutions in a number of different countries.

My major criticism is that the author has not provided a sufficient historical background that would demonstrate to the reader that this crisis is no different from the many past crises that have occurred over the past 400 years whenever the private banking industry has been able to engage in massive leveraged speculation.There is no mention of the great thinkers from the past and present,such as J M Keynes,Adam Smith,Benoit Mandelbrot,and Nassim Taleb, who have correctly identified the nature of the problem in the past.This is just the latest episode of the repeating and reoccurring problem of banker induced speculative bubbles that is ergodic and completely predictable.