WALL STREET
@ieltscope
Wall Street itself is a short street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, which takes its name from the town wall built in 1653 across Manhattan Island to protect the Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam from both the Native American Indians and the English. Symbolically, however, "Wall Street" means the financial center of the United States (just as the "City" of London is the financial center of the United Kingdom) because of the concentration of business institutions in the area: stock-brokerage companies, banks, trusts, insurance corporations, commodity exchanges (coffee, cotton, metal, corn) and, of course, the New York Stock Exchange.
The Exchange — sometimes called "the nation's market place" — was founded on May 17, 1792, when Alexander Hamilton, the first US Secretary of the Treasury, decided to issue government bonds to consolidate and refund the debts incurred during the War for American Independence; a "market place" for the selling and buying of these bonds became necessary.
The Exchange deals only in "listed" stocks, i.e. stocks which are on the official trading list of the Exchange. In order to be listed, a company must have at least 2,000 stockholders, with at least 1 million shares distributed among them, and an annual turnover of at least $2.5 million. In 1998, there were more than 2,500 listed stocks.
