Forum Post: History of Wall Street Part 1 - Dutch Venetian Roots

Did you ever wonder how Wall Street got its name? Or how the dealings in financial securities began? Or what role Wall Street has played throughout the history of our Republic? "Wall Street" wasn't there from the beginning, you know. Nor were the brokerage firms, the "investment" houses, the hedge funds, or any of the rest of it. During the 17th Century, when the Winthrop/Mather leadership in Massachusetts carried out an economic revolution through the use of public credit, raising living standards, developing an iron industry, building infrastructure, and erecting the world's first system of universal public education—all of this was done without Wall Street.

Despite today's popular, but mistaken, views, the financial activities of Wall Street have absolutely nothing to do with the functioning of a proper economy. "Wall Street" is neither an American, nor even a so-called "capitalist" institution. It is something else entirely.

In the 17th Century, when European colonies were planted on the eastern seaboard of North America, the premier colonies, those that represented a philosophical seedling that grew into the United States of America, were located in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Based on the concept of the Common Good, and organized around a philosophical view of man as a rational, creative creature, under the leadership of the Winthrop and Mather families, Massachusetts developed the political and economic institutions which became the basis for the American Republic. Most of the other colonies were also founded, to one degree or another, by individuals seeking political or religious liberty. But not New York! From the beginning it was an outpost of empire.

Present-day New York City was founded in 1626 as New Amsterdam, a commercial colony of the Dutch West India Company. All of the Dutch colonies, in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, were strictly commercial colonies, tightly controlled by the two imperial Dutch maritime firms, the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company. The colonies were deployed to extract loot (raw materials, spices, furs, etc.) from the colonial territories. Emigration from The Netherlands to the colonies was generally discouraged, and manual labor was done almost exclusively by slaves.

The Dutch West India Company was headquartered in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands. Beginning in the early 17th Century, Amsterdam became the commrecial and financial center and new power-base of the maritime/financial empire of Venice. Beginning with the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1601, the creation of the Amsterdam Bourse (stock exchange) in 1608, and then the takeover of the African slave trade in the 1620s, Amsterdam became the capital of a global empire. Later, after the Dutch conquest of Britain in 1688, the operations of the empire were gradually shifted to London.

Not only was Amsterdam the seat of a maritime empire. It was in Amsterdam, and later in London, that the modern concept of monetarism was born, based on the empiricist theories of the Venetian Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi's prescriptions, which denied human creativity its role in producing tangible physical wealth, defined all economic processes in strictly statistical monetary terms. Money took on a separate existence, independent of, and even superior to, the role of government. Amsterdam became the center for these monetarist practices, the laboratory for the creation of the Amsterdam Bourse, futures contracts, options trading, and practices nearly identical to modern-day derivatives trading. For example, the famous "tulip mania": When speculation on tulip bulbs reached its peak in 1637, bulbs sold for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. What would later emerge as "Wall Street" has its origins in these Amsterdam and post-1688 London financial practices.

Modern economists and academics argue that these Amsterdam-London developments heralded the dawn of modern "capitalism." Their arguments are echoed by those today who state that a continuation of speculative derivatives trading is also necessary. Balderdash! The speculative financial practices developed in Amsterdam and London, and later imposed by the British Empire on Wall Street, are monetarist practices of Empire, and are totally unnecessary for the functioning of a modern physical economy. As Alexander Hamilton proved in his Reports to Congress; as Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed with his greenback and related policies; and as Franklin Roosevelt revived in his New Deal: The American System of sovereign public credit is the most powerful engine for physical economic and scientific advancement ever devised by the human species.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2011/3842no_need_wall_st.html