This book recounts the colorful history of America’s love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types—the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist—all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.

这本书讲述了美国与华尔街的爱恨关系的丰富多彩的历史。史蒂夫·弗雷泽（Steve Fraser）围绕着四种华尔街标志性人物的角色展开了引人入胜的分析：贵族、自信的人、英雄和不道德的人——他们都是反复出现的人物，他们对国家如何与财富和工作、民主和精英主义等基本问题进行了斗争，并仍在进行斗争产生了令人惊讶的见解，贪婪和拯救。从1792年的第一次华尔街恐慌到我们这个时代的互联网泡沫破裂和安然丑闻，这本书充满了像J。P摩根、科尼利厄斯·范德比尔特和迈克尔·米尔肯。弗雷泽考虑了美国普通民众对华尔街相互矛盾的态度，并对最近华尔街被视为普通人避风港的观点进行了简短的反思。