The Library Means Business: Different roads can lead to Wall Street successes

What is the difference between today's Wall Street millionaires and the rest of us (besides millions of dollars)?

There are as many answers to that question as there are get-rich-quick schemes.

Some, like Michael Steinhardt, have a rags-to-riches story. Others, like George Soros, pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Still others, like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, did so by bilking others of their fortunes.

Whatever their road to riches, I bet they would have arrived sooner if they'd had access to books and Web sites such as these, which are available at the Springfield-Greene County Library.

Books@The Library

One dollar invested in the hedge fund Steinhardt Partners LP when it opened in 1967 would have been worth more than $480 when the fund was dissolved in 1995. Michael Steinhardt, the colorful perfectionist behind the fund, generally is considered to be one of history's premier money managers.

His autobiography, "No Bull: My Life In and Out of the Markets," contains few tips that investors will be able to emulate, but brings alive to the Missouri life experience a rags-to-riches rise from the streets of Brooklyn to Wall Street success.

The son of a compulsive gambler and jewel fence who divorced Michael's mother during the boy's first year of life, Steinhardt was worth over $7 million by age 38. A contrarian, Steinhardt stated: "Nothing gives a better feeling to a money manager than making money for his or her investors when almost everyone else is losing."

Wall Street's history actually began about 400 years ago in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which would evolve politically and economically into today s New York commercial scene. David Colbert's "Eyewitness to Wall Street: 400 Years of Dreamers, Schemers, Busts, and Booms," gives you Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, the Nifty Fifty, Liars' Poker and the Predators' Ball in an easy read with just the right amount of detail. If your knowledge of the days of the week doesn't include Silver Thursday, Black Friday and the Saturday Night Massacre, it will when you've finished these first-hand accounts.

Before writing "Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire," Michael Kaufman told George Soros: "I had been raised to believe that it was impossible for a really rich man to be a really good man. He answered that so had he, and that this was a reasonable position to take."

As a Hungarian Jewish teen-ager, Soros survived the Holocaust and, in an almost absent-minded fashion, became a billionaire after coming to Wall Street in 1956.

His true interest is philosophy and may explain why he turned from making money to giving it away. As a philanthropist, he shows no more taste for linear thinking than he did as a financer. With the Russian economy in the post-communist doldrums, Soros awarded $500 grants to 35,000 Russian scientists. He sent 1,000 copy machines to pre-Internet Hungary to stimulate free expression.

Whether or not he's a really good man, he's certainly really good at tipping established apple carts.

Pertinent Web sites

www.financialhistory.org/home.htm

There's plenty to see, virtually and otherwise, at the Museum of American Financial History, the nation's only independent public museum dedicated to celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship and the democratic free market tradition. An affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum tries to preserve, exhibit and teach in a context that is objective and grounded in historical perspective.

www.currencygallery.org

At this site you can see an example of virtually every type of paper money ever issued by the U.S. government. Browse the gallery by types, denominations, portraits, signatures or themes. One of the Exploratorium's "Ten Coolest Sites" for April 2002.

www.thestreet.com/basics/countdown/ 747950.html

View chronological or numerical lists of the 100 most important events and ideas that drove American business in the 20th century. Hint: No. 1 is "driven" by the President that historians love to shrug off, Dwight Eisenhower!

(Mike DePue is the business librarian at the Library Center, 4653 S. Campbell Ave.)