WALL STREET, JEWISH / ISRAELI ETHICS, AND THE WORLD OF FUND RAISING

Jewish dictate holds that the Jewish collective community is morally superior to all others and that, throughout history, they are victims of innocence. The next two chapters represent merely the beginning of an inquiry into this enforced myth, a myth represented everywhere in American popular culture as fact.

Among the economic fields in which Jews today are especially visible is investment banking -- "Wall Street," including interconnected networks of lawyers and other legal and economic manipulators stretching deeply into Hollywood and the mass media. Since the 1800s the "Old Crowd" of German-Jewish banking families (the Seligmans, Lehmans, Goldmans, Sachs, Warburgs, Schiffs, Loebs, et al) had predominated the field; a "New Crowd" of Jews has in recent decades taken their place. After World War II, melodramatically note Judith Ehrlich and Barry Rehfeld, "economic power in America and Wall Street was shifting ... Fresh faces came forward as if answering a call ... They were the children and grandchildren of Italian, Irish, Poles, and other Europeans who were not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. But most of all they were Jews." [EHRLICH, p. 12] This is not to suggest of course that the seminal Jewish American investment firms are today inconsequential. Far from it. In 1999, for instance, Goldman, Sachs and Co. stretched across the world to become the "single largest and controlling shareholder of South Korea's largest bank, Kookmin. [BLOOMBERG NEWS, p. 11]

"In the world of high finance," observed Gerald Krefetz, "Jewish interest is concerned with investment banking, a broad catchall for activities ranging from tendering advice to underwriting securities. The heart of investment banking is public offerings and private placements, the risking of capital -- sometimes ones' own, but more often other peoples' -- to finance new companies, or expand old ones." [KREFETZ, p. 54] The nature of Wall Street entrepreneurship might well be presumed in the title of a 1986 volume by Ken Auletta: Greed and Glory on Wall Street: the Fall of the House of Lehman, or Martin Meyer's Nightmare on Wall Street: Salomon Brothers and the Corruption of the Marketplace (1993). Both Lehman and Solomon are Jewish-founded firms.
A French Jewish commentator, Bernard Lazare, noted Jewish propensities in high finance in the late 1800s:
"The man of the lower middle class, the small tradesman at whom
speculation has probably ruined has much clearer ideas of why he
is an anti-Semite. He knows that reckless speculation [by financiers],
with its attendant panics, has been his bane, and for him, the most
formidable jugglers of capital, the most dangerous speculators, are the
Jews; which, indeed, is very true." [LAZARE, B., p. 173]
Finance, investment banking, brokerage, and commodities are the speediest ways (short of outright crime) to get rich in America; by 1988 the stock and bond market and linked economic activities totaled 12 trillion dollars a year (six times the value of the assets of Fortune's top 500 companies). "Where the money went," note Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "and what happened to it were greatly influenced by Wall Street power brokers." [EHRLICH, p. 19] Corporate mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers have become an especially lucrative field. "By the 1980s, says Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "along with [Gentile] T. Boone Pickens, and a few others ... the [Jewish] New Crowd was at the very core of the mergers and acquisitions field." [EHRLICH, p. 15].... [This circle of money men] bought luxurious homes, expensive art, high-priced foreign cars, designer clothes and jewelry; they hosted or appeared at the right parties." [EHRLICH, p. 16] ... The old WASP establishment had seen its wealth eroded by changing tax laws and inflation ... arriviste Jews began to appear on the boards of such time-honored WASP institutions as the Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Public Library." [EHRLICH, p. 5] ... The New Crowd broke the stranglehold of the Establishment WASP bankers and [older Jewish] Our Crowd competitors ... and extended profit centers to newer financial activities such as block trading, risk arbitrage, a wide range of retail securities products, financial futures, listed trading of options, and junk bond financing that helped companies expand and made almost every company vulnerable to a takeover, a leveraged buyout that restructured corporate entities and raised critical debt levels." More