Where the Money Grows

Before a single broker or banker appears, Garrett tells you how to read everyone who follows. The people of Wall Street, he says, are not a separate species: "Except as they practise the trade of money with strange, three-edged tools, Wall Street folk are like other folk."

That sentence quietly sets aside the two usual ways of seeing the Street, as a den of geniuses or a den of thieves. What is strange there is the tools, not the people holding them.

So when a speculator in these pages does something absurd, resist the comfortable thought that you never would. He is like other folk anywhere else, and that includes the person reading about him.

Garrett's word for what happens to these ordinary people is refraction. His stated purpose is to show how familiar illusions bend as they pass through the Wall Street lens.

Push a straight stick into a glass of water and it looks broken at the surface. Nothing happened to the stick; the water bent the light. Garrett's illusions work the same way. Hope, habit, the dread of bad luck, the wish to believe that somebody somewhere knows: these are common to everyone. Pass them through a place where money changes hands every minute and they come out looking crooked and exotic.

He adds a quieter second point. The Stock Exchange mind may be shaped by the material in which it works. Handle prices all day, and prices begin to handle you.

In the preface, what does Garrett mean when he says familiar illusions refract upon the Wall Street lens?

• Newspapers bend the truth about Wall Street before the public sees it
• Brokers deliberately distort prices to plant illusions in their clients
• Wall Street breeds new illusions that exist nowhere else in life
• Ordinary human illusions look strange when bent through the trade of money✓Correct answer

The illusions are the familiar ones; only the medium of money bends them into odd shapes. The first option is the reading he argues against: if the Street had illusions of its own, its people would not be like other folk.

A book with a wolf and a manipulator in it seems to promise one of two things: an exposé of the crooks, or a quiet tip on how the insiders win. Garrett delivers neither. Nobody in these pages is unmasked, and nobody hands you a system.

What he offers instead is a method: "The secret of understanding is to get their point of view." The aim is understanding, not a verdict.

One small detail fits that spirit. The scanned copy this course reads from carries the bookplate of Frank A. Vanderlip, who ran National City Bank when the book appeared. A working bank president kept on his shelf a book with a chapter called "A Bank President."

Getting someone's point of view is harder than judging him, and it costs more. Judgment lets you stay outside the glass. Point of view puts you in the water with him.

Here is the test. When a character in this book believes something foolish about money, ask what he was seeing at that moment that made it feel sensible. Usually you will find something you have done yourself: trusting a confident voice, repeating a ritual because it once worked, taking a lucky streak for a gift.

That is the uncomfortable edge of Garrett's thesis. If Wall Street folk are ordinary, then the reader is not exempt. The same illusions wait wherever money is on the table, including the kitchen table.

According to Garrett's preface, the illusions of a Wall Street speculator are made of exactly the same stuff as the illusions of people everywhere else.

True✓Correct answer

True, and he says it flatly: everywhere, life's illusions are all of the same sheer stuff. What changes from place to place is only how they are refracted, not what they are made of.