The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Gonzo Wall Street: RIOTS,RADICALS,RACISM AND REVOLUTION: How the Go-Go Bankers of the 1960s Crashed the Financial System and Bamboozled Washington by Richard E. Farley

Gonzo Wall Street: RIOTS,RADICALS,RACISM AND REVOLUTION: How the Go-Go Bankers of the 1960s Crashed the Financial System and Bamboozled Washington by Richard E. Farley The long-hidden history of how the corrupt Wall Street investment banks of the 1960s held Congress over a barrel and got an outrageous taxpayer-funded bailout of what they owed their customers—and how little Congress and the SEC got from Wall Street in return. This set the precedent for the bailouts of the 2008 Financial Crisis—and the next Wall Street bailout. A story of corruption and financial malfeasance, it unfolds throughout the tumultuous 1960s, during the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon with a surprising cast of famous and infamous characters playing roles: Abbie Hoffman, Roy Cohn, Ross Perot, Donald Regan, Michael Bloomberg, Felix Rohaytn, Sandy Weill, Ken Langone, and many others. In the 1960s, the fabric of American society was torn apart by deep divisions over the Vietnam War, violence in our cities, and the senseless assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy. Civil rights, as well as women’s and gay liberation movements, were challenging America. Music, literature, fashion, and “substances” were transforming the culture and upending conventional morality and manners. The public, the media, and politicians, preoccupied with these dramatic changes, paid little attention to Wall Street, where a crisis was brewing that would cause more investment banks to fail than during the Great Depression. The year 1968 should have been the best of times on Wall Street. It was the greatest bull market since the Roaring ’20s. The Dow was breaking records. Trading volume was exploding. A hot IPO market for high-flying technology companies was defying gravity. And a swashbuckling mergers and acquisitions wave was generating enormous profits. Despite how flush Wall Street firms looked to outsiders, in truth, they were not a thundering herd but one in need of cul